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TROPHONIUS SLAYING AGAMEDES AT THE TREASURY OF 
IIYRIEUS. 



SOME OLD MAS- 
TERS OE GREEK 
ARCHITECTURE 



By HARRY DOUGLAS 

CURATOR OP * « « 
KELLOGG TERRACE 




PUBLISHED KT THE 

QURRTCR-OAK 

GREAT BARRINGTON, 
MASS., 1599 « * « * 



O COPIED 

Library of Ca BgM , % 
Qfflco of the 

H*gl*t9r of Copyright* 



54865 



Copyright, 1899, 
By HARRY DOUGLAS. 



SECOND COPY. 








O EDWARD 
TRANCIS 
SCARLES 



WHOSE APPRECIATION OF THE HARMONIES OF ART, AND 

"WHOSE HIGH IDEALS OF ARCHITECTURE HAVE FOUND 

EXPRESSION IN MANY ENDURING FORMS, THIS BOOK IS 

RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED. 




^ 



PBEERCE 

Tub temptation to wander, with all the recklessness 
of an amateur, into the traditions of the best architec- 
ture, which necessarily could be found only in the his- 
tory of early Hellenic art, awakened in the author a 
desire to ascertain who were the individual artists 
primarily responsible for those architectural standards, 
which have been accepted without rival since their crea- 
tion. The search led to some surprise when it was found 
how little was known or recorded of them, and how 
great appeared to be the indifference in which they 
were held by nearly all the writers upon ancient art, 
as well as by their contemporary historians and biog- 
raphers. The author therefore has gone into the field 
of history, tradition and fable, with a basket on his arm, 
as it were, to cull some of the rare and obscure flowers 
of this artistic family, dropping into the basket also 
such facts directlv or indirectly associated with the 



VI PEEFACE. 

architects of ancient Greece, or their art, as interested 
him personally. The basket is here set down, contain- 
ing, if nothing more, at least a brief allusion to no less 
than eighty-two architects of antiquity. The fact is 
perfectly appreciated that many fine specimens may 
have been overlooked ; that scant justice has been done 
those gathered, and that the basket is far too small to 
contain all that so rich a field could offer. 

This book, therefore, aims at nothing more than a 
superficial glance at the subject, and the author will be 
content if he has accomplished anything toward bring- 
ing those great geniuses of a noble art into a little 
modern light, who have been left very much to them- 
selves in one of the gloomiest chambers of a deep 
obscurity. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

1. Popular Appreciation of Architects, . 1 

2. Mythical and Archaic Architects and 

Builders, 24 

3. Originators of the "Three Orders," . 49 

4. Early Grecian Architects, 63 

5. Architectural Epoch of Pericles, . . 90 

6. Architects of the Age of Pericles, . . 103 

7. Later Greek Architects, 136 

8. Alexandrian Era, and Roman Spoliation, 148 

9. Alexandrian Architects, 164 

Index of Architects and Architectural 

Sculptors, 185 




CHAPTEE I. 

The Popular Appreciation of Architects. 

IF all the fine arts none more completely answers 
[for its raison d'etre than architecture. In this 
■art alone do we find the harmonious mingling 
of sesthetical fancy with utilitarian purpose. It is this 
feature of usefulness that completes its well-rounded 
perfection, rather than detracts from it, and dignifies 
its mission of existence. Architecture, in its capacity 
to draw to its enrichment the other arts, may be com- 
pared to the polished orator, whose purpose is to sway 
the judgment of his audience by forensic effort, embel- 
lishing his language with the flowers of rhetoric, adapt- 
ing his gestures to graceful emphasis, and controlling 
his voice to suit the light and shade of his thought. So 
sculpture has been stimulated by architecture and has 
contributed to its ornamentation; painting has been 
invoked to the highest accomplishments, and music has 
awakened within its walls voice and harmony. "The 
progress of other arts depends on that of architecture," 



A SOME OLD MASTERS 

Sir William Chambers very truly says. "When build- 
ing is encouraged, painting, sculpture, gardening and 
all other decorative arts flourish of course, and these 
have an influence on manufactures, even to the minutest 
mechanic productions ; for design is of universal ad- 
vantage, and stamps a value on the most trifling per- 
formance." 

It is perhaps not a little odd that despite its pre- 
eminent inrportance, and the high rank which it has ever 
assumed, from that early time when the first rays of 
dawning civilization began to warm the latent germs of 
culture and refinement in human nature, to the present 
day, it is the only art that has not, with very rare and 
isolated exceptions, stamped renown upon those who 
have practised it as a profession, and lifted the artist 
into the lasting remembrance and gratitude of the ad- 
mirers of his works. How greatly the painter, the 
sculptor, the musician, are identified with their arts, and 
the products of their brush, chisel or pen ! how great has 
been their praise, how lasting and unstinted the esteem 
in which they have been held ! but how reserved has 
been the applause that has encouraged the architect who 
has given to the world the grand and noble results of his 
skill and genius, and how soon he himself has been for- 
gotten ! It happens only too often that it is the name of 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 6 

the distinguished painter that stamps the value of his 
canvas rather than the merits of the picture itself. The 
title of a beautiful piece of sculptured marble is not 
asked with greater eagerness than that of the artist who 
created it. Bach and Beethoven and Mozart are played 
and sung to the popular audiences rather than their 
fugues, their sonatas and their symphonies. 

But what is known of the artists who have reared the 
greatest monuments of enduring architecture \ Their 
personality, and even their names, appear to have faded 
from popular recollection. This seems to have been 
the fact from the earliest days of the art in Greece and 
Borne to the present time. The exceptions are so rare, 
throughout all the intervening ages, and the waving 
prominence of the art, that they might almost be num- 
bered upon the fingers of a single hand. 

The reader, if he is not a professional architect, or 
an amateur who has read deeply in his favorite subject, 
can arrive at the truth of this seemingly exaggerated 
statement, if he will lay aside this book for a moment 
and try to recall the names of the designers of some of 
the more conspicuous monuments of architecture he has 
visited at home or abroad. 

"I will erect such a building, but I will hang it up 
in the air," exclaimed Michael Angelo when he saw the 



4 SOME OLD MASTERS 

dome of the Pantheon at Rome. The reader may re- 
member this boast of the great Renaissance genius, the 
fulfilment of it in the colossal dome of St. Peter's, and 
be satisfied that his memory has captured one architect 
of celebrity. If the beautiful Florentine campanile of 
Giotto looms up in his recollection he will think at once 
also of that early artist, but perhaps not more so in con- 
nection with that ornate tower than in association with 
the Pre-Raphaelites. Of course, he will not overlook 
Inigo Jones, whose very name is stamped upon the 
memory by reason of its peculiarity, or Sir Christopher 
Wren, the creator of St. Paul's, and the British idol. If 
he is an admirer of the picturesque architecture of 
Venetian churches and palaces, the Italian Palladio 
may not escape him ; and if of French Renaissance, the 
Louvre facade will possibly suggest Perrault, and the 
Parisian roofs Mansard. If he is a native of our 
"Modern x\thens," of course, the peril in which the 
classic front of the State House rested for a time, at 
the hands of a fin de siecle legislature, will not permit 
him to forget Bulfmch, and Trinity Church will bring 
to memory the only Richardson. But aside from a few 
names such as have been mentioned, with possibly a 
sprinkling of others fixed in the memory, by incident 
or association, the average reader, however well ac- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 5 

quainted he may be with the numerous luminaries of the 
other arts, will be unable to say who was responsible for 
the beauty and nobility of many buildings that have in- 
dividualized the cities and towns of their location to the 
art-loving world. Who, for example, can tell of the 
authors of the cathedrals at Milan and Siena, Cologne 
and Strassburg, Rheims and Amiens, Wells and Litch- 
field ; the Giralda at Seville ; the Church of the Invalides 
at Paris ; the Strozzi Palace at Florence ; the Henry 
VII. chapel at Westminster Abbey ; the much and justly 
admired south facade of the old City Hall in New York ; 
Grace Church in that city ; the Capitol building in 
Washington, or that model of colonial architecture in 
America, the Executive Mansion ? 

It is not, however, the purpose to here speculate too 
extensively upon the apparent lack of justice on the 
part of the general public which has been done the 
architects of all climes and times, but to gather together 
a few facts concerning the Old Masters of early Grecian 
architecture that are not popularly known, and recall 
some of the leading lights of that art so inimitably prac- 
tised by the Hellenic people during their progress from 
archaic darkness to the zenith of their aesthetic culture. 

It is but repeating a well-worn truth to say that the 
influence of the early Grecian architects upon the fol- 



O SOME OLD MASTERS 

lowers of their art in all countries of recognized civilized 
enlightenment, throughout the ages that have succeeded 
them, has been an almost dominant one. Robert Adam, 
the architectural authority in the time of George III., 
says, in the introduction to his work on the ruins 
of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian : "The build- 
ings of the ancients are in architecture what the works 
of nature are with respect to the other arts : they serve 
as models which we should imitate and as standards by 
which we ought to judge ; for this reason they who aim 
at eminence, either in the knowledge or practice of 
architecture, find it necessary to view with their own 
eyes the works of the ancients which remain, that they 
may catch from them those ideas of grandeur and 
beauty which nothing, perhaps, but such an observation 
can suggest." 

It is equally true that no country that has experienced 
an evolution in intelligence and culture, during the 
twenty-five hundred years that have fled since the time 
of Pericles, has succeeded in introducing any new school 
of architecture, that has not been compelled to draw 
upon ancient Greece for many of the most important 
and essential features of the art it could only modify, 
but never wholly re-create. 

The Gothic, or pointed-arch style, that sprung into 



OF GKEEK ARCHITECTURE. 7 

such beautiful being in the thirteenth century, and 
reigned a queen within the Christian countries of 
Europe for several centuries thereafter, came more 
nearly answering for an original scheme of architecture 
than perhaps any other of equal importance, and yet had 
it been deprived of the Grecian props that helped to sus- 
tain it, it must have fallen to the ground. 

In the Gothic the effort was made to incline the in- 
herited principles of architecture more closely toward 
the spiritual progress of the people, but when at last it 
had run its course, and was dethroned, owing to a reali- 
zation of the fact that even a closer allegiance to classic 
models could be made to answer still better spiritual 
requirements, how completely did the artistic tempera- 
ment of the people revert to Greece and Rome, as the 
light of their returning inspiration and truth appeared 
with the dawn of the sixteenth century. Renaissance 
architecture and Renaissance art swept Eiirope like a 
wave, and the people turned with reactionary enthusi- 
asm to the ancient standards of art, as they did to the 
study of classic authors, and to the writing of even 
Greek and Latin verses. 

The debt of gratitude, therefore, which posterity has 
owed the originators in ancient Greece of the three 
noble orders of architecture — namely, the Doric, Ionic 



8 SOME OLD MASTERS 

and Corinthian — can scarcely be overestimated, for it 
is to those three orders or styles that all subsequent 
architects have turned for the fundamental truths of 
their art. They may not have followed each or all with 
conventional strictness ; but they have not succeeded in 
escaping from borrowing many of the features there 
everlastingly fixed by the unerring geniuses of classic 
times. 

"Famous Greece! 
That source of art, and cultivated thought, 
Which they to Rome, and Romans hither brought." 

The uses to which the Greek and Roman architectural 
forms, principles and ornaments have been put since the 
birth of the Renaissance have broadened largely, and 
would seem to preclude any possibility of their ever 
again falling into even partial desuetude. It is not only 
in the more pretentious buildings, monuments and orna- 
mental structures that abound so plentifully in the pop- 
ulous and wealthy cities that classic models and fea- 
tures are so liberally employed, but even the unpre- 
tentious and simple rural homes cannot escape their use. 
What is more common than the Doric mutule or 
Corinthian modillion, so frequently seen in the cornices 
of modern housed, or the Ionic dentils that show their 
teeth below a piazza roof or over the door casing of a 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 



colonial dwelling? The various combinations of the 
fret, the egg and dart, the bead and fillet, the honey- 
suckle, the acanthus and many other Grecian motifs of 
ornamentation, are met with constantly, not only in 
buildings of a public or private nature, but in furniture 
and fresco, in interior decoration, and in enhancing the 
attractiveness of almost any article of use or ornament. 
Even the simple ogee moulding, which is employed, if 
nowhere else, about the door panels of the humblest 
abode, is classic in its origin, and had its archetype in 
the entablatures of those stately and beautiful temples 
dedicated to the pagan gods of ancient Greece. 

It must not be inferred, however, that all the in- 
dividual features employed in the Greek orders found 
their birth in the brains of Hellenic architects. Sir 
Jeremy Bentham says : 

"From Egypt arts their progress made to Greece, 
Wrapt in the fable of the Golden Fleece." 

This statement, however, though poetical, is much 
too sweeping to be literally correct as to architecture. 
The Greeks borrowed a little — a very little — not only 
from the Egyptians, but from the Assyrians, the Chal- 
deans, the Persians, and other western Asiatic races as 
well; but so altered what they had borrowed, so re- 
fined it and entwined it with original conceptions of 



10 SOME OLD MASTERS 

their own, that the captive features could have returned 
again to their native lands without fear of detection. 
Indeed as to the origin of some of the architectural fea- 
tures which the Greeks are supposed to have taken from 
the countries of a more unrefined people to the south 
and east of them, and especially as to the volute, so con- 
spicuous in the Ionic capital, which is supposed to have 
been a Persian conception, there is much dispute. 

Professor T. Roger Smith, of London, very truly ob- 
serves : "We cannot put a finger upon any feature of 
Egyptian, Assyrian or Persian architecture the influ- 
ence of which has survived to the present day, except 
such as were adopted by the Greeks. On the other 
hand, there is no feature, no ornament, nor even any 
principle of design which the Greek architects em- 
ployed that can be said to have now become obsolete." 

In discussing the three primary orders of which men- 
tion has been made, and to which he adds the Tuscan and 
Composite, both of Italian or Roman origin, and closely 
dependent upon the original three, Sir William Cham- 
bers remarks: ''The ingenuity of man has hitherto not 
been able to produce a sixth order, though large pre- 
miums have been offered, and numerous attempts been 
made by men of first-rate talents, to accomplish it. Such 
is the fettered human imagination, such the scanty store 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 11 

of its ideas, that Doric, Ionic and Corinthian have ever 
floated uppermost, and all that has been produced 
amounts to nothing more than different arrangements 
and combinations of their parts, with some trifling 
deviations scarcely deserving notice ; the whole tend- 
ing generally more to diminish than to increase the 
beauty of the ancient orders. . . . The suppres- 
sion of parts of the ancient orders, with a view to pro- 
duce novelty, has of late years been practised among us 
with full as little success ; and although it is not wished 
to restrain sallies of imagination, nor to discourage 
genius from attempting to invent, yet it is apprehended 
that attempts to alter the primary forms invented by 
the ancients, and established by the concurring approba- 
tion of many ages, must ever be attended with dangerous 
consequences, must always be difficult, and seldom, if 
ever, successful." Thus is seen the marvellous discre- 
tion and judgment exercised by the Grecian architects 
in selecting from contemporary art that alone which 
was best to perpetuate, and thus is well expressed in the 
statement of indisputable fact, a tribute to their origi- 
nality and creative genius. 

And who were these Old Masters of classic architec- 
ture — older in point of service to their art by thousands 
of years than Giotto and Raphael and Michael Angelo 



12 SOME OLD MASTERS 

and Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren, and many 
others who might be mentioned, and who in campanile 
and cathedral, in public building and private palace, in 
monument and mausoleum, have proved themselves 
justly entitled to the laurels with which they have been 
crowned, but who nevertheless are but disciples of Hel- 
lenic and Roman masters ? Where do we find the 
biographies of the original Old Masters of architecture 
recorded ? Where can we turn to read of their lives, of 
their deeds and achievements, of their aspirations and 
ambitions, of their shortcomings and their foibles ? 
Where are written down those anecdotes and incidents 
of personal interest, so entertaining in association with 
their works or their art I What, in fact, were their 
names ? There is comparatively little recorded of the 
lives of the Greek and Roman architects with which to 
answer these questions ; strange as it may appear, even 
their names are unfamiliar, and in many important in- 
stances are forgotten altogether. Among that large 
galaxy of brilliant men which Greece in her prime pro- 
duced, who figured prominently in almost every walk 
of life, who were great in war and in peace, in phi- 
losophy and poetry, in satire and history, in oratory and 
valor, and as great, if hot greater than in all, in statuary 
and sculpture — a galaxy clinging to the memory in all 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 13 

ages of human progress, because never excelled, the 
name of a Grecian architect is a strange sound, and does 
not ring in tune, if it is ever heard at all, with the 
names enrolled upon the list of Greek immortals. 

The sculptors and statuaries of ancient Greece are 
especially well remembered in the popular mind, and 
Myron and Phidias and Praxiteles and Polycletus call 
for no introduction to the ordinarily informed lover of 
art ; not so the designer of the Parthenon or the Temple 
of Theseus, or the Erechtheum, or the Choragic monu- 
ment of Lysicrates. It is strange that the artist who 
modelled or chiselled a bull or a cow or a Faun or a 
nude Venus, or any pagan god or goddess, however 
much we may praise the excellence of his skill, should 
be remembered by posterity, while the artist, his con- 
temporary, who designed the most beautiful and grace- 
ful buildings of all time, which in their glory were the 
pride of their people, and which in their decay and ruin 
are still the loadstones that attract pilgrims from the 
most distant lands, is forgotten, and, it would appear, 
denied almost the humblest mention. Can it not be 
said of the Grecian architects, as well as the Grecian 
sculptors, that under the magic of their touch "Stones 
leap'd to form, and rocks began to live" ? Were not the 
temples they reared in all the pride of surpassing 



14 SOME OLD MASTEES 

beauty, which tempted the sculptor's caress on frieze 
and pediment, and which gave shelter to those works of 
the statuary's art which Shakespeare recalls so vividly 
when he draws the simile : 

"They spake not a word. 
But, like dumb statues, or unbreathing stones, 
Stared at each other, and look'd deadly pale," 

as much entitled to give immortality to their creators 
as the works, however competitive, of other branches of 
art to their authors ? And still so incidentally and in- 
differently have the historians and biographers of their 
time alluded to the Grecian architects, that little or 
nothing is to be found to quench that desire to know of 
them personally, which an interest in their grand 
achievements may well awaken. 

Did we not know it to be otherwise, we might think 
that they, too, were like the poor architect of whom 
Goethe speaks : "He is employed in lavishing all the 
luxury of his fancy upon halls from which he is to be 
ever excluded, and display his ingenuity in bestowing 
the utmost convenience upon apartments he must not 
enjoy." But it does not appear that any social discrim- 
ination was exercised against the Greek architects to 
cast a shadow upon their present or future fame. 

It is popularly believed that the great buildings of the 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 15 

ancient world were very long in the process of construc- 
tion — that they, in fact, took many decades and some- 
times even hundreds of years to complete. If this were 
true it might in a measure explain the obscurity in 
which their architects have been left, inasmuch as the 
original designer of the building might have been for- 
gotten ere the last of his successors had finished the work 
he had undertaken. But this is not altogether the fact. 
Even the pyramid of Cheops — that colossal marvel of 
the creative genius of man — we are informed by some 
authorities took but thirty years to construct, ten of 
which were given to the building of a road leading to 
the site of the pyramid, for the greater facility in hand- 
line the huge blocks of stone to be used. Neither were 
the temples and public edifices of Greece and Home, as 
a rule, long in building, being generally undertaken and 
finished during the influential period of a public man's 
career, or the reign of a single emperor. There were, of 
course, exceptions to this rule, as, for example, the tem- 
ple of Apollo at Delphi, that erected toDiana at Ephesus, 
and that dedicated to Jupiter at Athens ; but in nearly 
all such instances it will be found that the temples were 
destroyed and rebuilt during the long interval which is 
supposed to have passed from the time when their foun- 
dations were first laid, to that which found them again 



16 SOME OLD MASTERS 

in all respects completed structures ; or, if not destroyed 
and the work undertaken anew, the delay was caused by 
some political influence which contributed to check the 
continuous prosecution of the work, implying no pro- 
crastination on the part of the original builders. But 
even in the most of such cases the names of the various 
architects who were from time to time associated with 
the work are at least known, if their biographies are 
not more fully recorded. 

It may be stated broadly that both the Greeks and the 
Romans were rapid builders when the size of their edi- 
fices is taken into account. Especially is this true of 
the time of Pericles, if we are to believe the testimony of 
Plutarch : "Every architect strived to surpass the mag- 
nificence of design with the elegance of execution, yet 
still the most wonderful circumstance was the expedition 
with which they [the buildings] were completed. Many 
edifices, each of which seemed to require the labor of 
successive ages, were finished during the administration 
of one prosperous man." And the great biographer also 
adds : " Hence we have the more reason to 

wonder that the structures raised by Pericles should be 
built in so short a time, and yet built for ages, for each 
of them as soon as finished had the venerable air of an- 
tiquity ; so now they are old they have the freshness of 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 17 

a modern building. A bloom is diffused over them 
which preserves their aspect untarnished by time, as if 
they were animated by a spirit of perpetual youth and 
unfading elegance." 

Another mistaken idea is that the sculptors of ancient 
times were also architects. Some instances occur where, 
like the Italian, Michael Angelo, a prominent sculptor 
of Greece or Rome, made architecture one of his accom- 
plishments, but they were not as numerous as they are 
supposed to have been, and the rule seems to be the re- 
verse : that the sculptors of antiquity had no technical 
knowledge of architecture, and that the arts were quite 
as distinctly practised as professions in early times as 
they are to-day. 

There remains to be presented only one other reason 
for the indifference shown the early architects by their 
contemporary writers and public, which is so well ex- 
pressed by an English historian in his discussion of the 
Coliseum at Rome, that it may well be quoted as a type 
of the excuse offered by apologists of the same class: 
"The name of the architect to whom the great work of 
the Coliseum was entrusted has not come down to us.* 

*There is an old ecclesiastical tradition, which is much doubted, 
that the architect of the Coliseum was a Christian by the name of 
Gaudentius, who suffeted martyrdom in its arena, and tliat the ser- 
vices of thousands of Jews contributed to its erection. 



18 SOME OLD MASTERS 

The ancients seem themselves to have regarded this 
name as a matter of little interest ; nor in fact do they 
generally care to specify the authorship of their most 
illustrious buildings. The reason is obvious. The forms 
of ancient art in this department were almost wholly 
conventional, and the limits of design within which they 
were executed gave little room for the display of orig- 
inal taste and special character. . . . It is only in 
periods of electicism and Renaissance, when the taste of 
the architect has wider scope and may lead the eye in- 
stead of following it, that interest attaches to his per- 
sonal merit. Thus it is that the Coliseum, the most con- 
spicuous type of Roman civilization, the monument 
which divides the admiration of strangers in modern 
Rome with St. Peter's itself, is nameless and parentless, 
while every stage in the construction of the great Chris- 
tian temple, the creation of a modern revival, is appro- 
priated with jealous care to its special claimants." In 
other words, the pupil is a fitter artist to awaken the 
personal interest of those who admire his works than his 
master; and the revived imitation of more consequence 
to the public than the original model. If this were true, 
why should the Coliseum, "the most conspicuous type 
of Roman civilization," upon which the pilgrims of the 
Xorth, as we are informed by Gibbon, based the longev- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 19 

ity of Rome itself, when in their rude enthusiasm they 
gave expression to the proverb, "As long as the Coliseum 
stands, Rome shall stand ; when the Coliseum falls, 
Rome will fall ; when Rome falls, the world will fall," 
divide the admiration of the stranger with St. Peter's? 
Should it not, rather, be subordinate to the Christian 
cathedral of Bramante, Raphael and Michael Angelo ? 
Is there not a touch of the reductio ad absurdum in this 
argument ? Such reasoning does not seem to be quite 
obvious upon other grounds as well. If it is the fact 
that the ancients regarded the names of their architects 
as of little interest, and their buildings as wholly con- 
A'entional, why does Vitruvius speak of four of the prin- 
cipal temples of Greece as "having raised their archi- 
tects to the summit of renown" % Why is it that Rhoecus 
and Theodoras, Ictinus, Mnesicles, Dinocrates, Detria- 
nus, Apollodorus and many other architects — to whom 
more particular mention will be made later — are remem- 
bered in ancient history with more or less circumstan- 
tiality, not only in association with their works — all 
conventional, if we are to accept this writer's judg- 
ment — but also on account of their individual merit, 
while the architects of the buildings which departed 
most from that same conventionality, both in plan 
and detail, as, for example, the Erechtheum, the 



20 SOME OLD MASTERS 

original Odeon of Pericles and even the Coliseum 
itself, where : 

"Firm Doric pillars formed the solid base, 
The fair Corinthian crown the higher space, 
And all below is strength, and all above is grace," 

are lost in the ocean of oblivion ? 

Do not our modern authors overlook the fact that the 
architects of their own age share, as a rule, in the same 
popular indifference, and that the period of revival is no 
exception to the period of inception ; that the one has 
inherited from the other not only the forms and prin- 
ciples of its art, but the same neglect of its artists ? 

Whether this is true or not, the fact must remain and 
be accepted with patience or impatience, as we please, 
that there is little preserved for us by the ancient writers 
in respect to their architects. Two rather conspicuous 
exceptions, however, occur to this general rule in respect 
to Pausanias, the Lydian, and Vitruvius Pollio, the 
Roman. 

Pausanias lived toward the close of the second cen- 
tury after Christ. He was a great traveller and a close 
observer, his observations having been confined princi- 
pally to works of art, such as public buildings, temples 
and statues, which he mentions in direct and simple lan- 
imaffe. He visited most of the states of Greece at a 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 21 

time when that country was still rich in her treasures of 
art, and what he has to say of what he saw there would 
tend to indicate that while he was by no means a critic 
or a connoisseur, he was still a faithful and minute re- 
corder of what appealed to his taste or excited his curi- 
osity. 

Vitruvius, however, was not only a writer on archi- 
tecture, but a professional architect as well, who resided 
in Rome about a century earlier than Pausanias, or in 
the time of Augustus. He is practically the only writer 
of his time who has given us technical information con- 
cerning the ancient buildings. Vitruvius wrote his 
treatises upon architecture at a very advanced age, and, 
it would appear, much in defence of the pure Greek 
models which were even in that time being corrupted. 
The frankness with which he hopes for fame by reason 
of his book, and exposes his poverty as well as the unpro- 
fessional practices of his brother architects, is not the 
least attractive feature of his discourse : "But I, Cresar," 
he exclaims, ''have not sought to amass wealth by the 
practice of my art, having been contented with a small 
fortune and reputation, than desirous of abundance ac- 
companied by a want of reputation. It is true I have 
acquired but little, yet I still hope, by this publication, 
to become known to posterity. Neither is it wonderful 



22 SOME OLD MASTERS 

that I am known to but few. Other architects canvass 
and go about soliciting employment, but my preceptors 
instilled into me a sense of the propriety of being re- 
quested and not of requesting to be entrusted, inasmuch 
the ingenuous man will blush and feel shame in asking 
a favour ; for the givers of a favour, and not the receiv- 
ers, are courted. What must he suspect who is solicited 
by another to be entrusted with the expenditure of his 
money, but that it is done for the sake of gain and emol- 
ument ? Hence, the ancients entrusted their works to 
those architects only who were of good family, and well 
brought up, thinking it better to trust the modest than 
the bold and arrogant man. These artists only instructed 
their own children or relations, having regard to their 
integrity, so that property might be safely committed to 
their charge. When, therefore, I see this noble science 
in the hands of the unlearned and unskilful of men, not 
only ignorant of architecture, but of everything relative 
to buildings, I cannot blame proprietors who, relying 
on their own intelligence, are their own architects ; since, 
if the business is to be conducted by the unskilful, there 
is at least more satisfaction in laying out money at one's 
own pleasure rather than at that of another person." 

Vitruvius also epitomized in his books on architec- 
ture much that had been written prior to his time by his 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 23 

professional brethren of Greece and Rome, and so pre- 
served something of what otherwise might have been en- 
tirely lost. 

Allusion has been made to these two writers with 
some particularity, for the reason that they will be more 
quoted than any others in the course of this volume, but 
it must not be inferred that they are alone responsible 
for all the knowledge which has come down to us respect- 
ing the Greek and Roman architects, little and unsatis- 
factory as it is. 

Although it has been shown that the historians and 
biographers of ancient Greece made no attempt to 
treat architects with especial favor, it would not be 
just, however, to close this chapter without quoting 
from Homer to prove that he, at least, could rank them 
as among those who, by serving the people in the highest 
sense, were entitled to unusual hospitality: 

". . . What man goes ever forth 
To bid a stranger to his house, unless 
The stranger be of those whose office is 
To serve the people, be he seer, or leech, 
Or architect, or poet heaven-inspired, 
Whose song is gladly heard \ . . ." 



24 SOME OLD MASTERS 



CHAPTER II. 

The Mythical and Aechaic Architects and 
Builders. 




' |ISTO~RY does not probe so deeply into the 

earliest annals of the races that inhabited the 

aa^jPeloponnesian peninsula, that it does not 
show them to have been pre-eminent as builders ; nor 
does it follow the ancient Greek people throughout the 
long ages that spanned their evolution and decadence, 
that it does not find them in all the stages through which 
they passed, leaving at least some of their walls, temples 
or monuments to resist the ravages of all time, and the 
decaying influences of the elements. They built, there- 
fore, not only well, but perhaps better than they knew, 
and have proved that if the creations of their intellects 
were immortal, as we know, the works of their hands 
were not altogether perishable. 

The Pelasgic tribes, who were the first of which 
there is any record to have inhabited Greece, were 
great wall-builders, and past-masters of defensive 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 25 

architecture in those early ages. Although we may 
not have the names of the individual architects 
among them, we have their racial works still before 
us to evidence the fact that whoever the architects 
were, they knew their business eminently well. The 
Acropolis at Athens possesses the finest example that re- 
mains of Pelasgic mural work, in the fortified retaining 
wall which surrounds it, and which is sometimes called 
after the race that built it, the Pelasgicum. 

It is claimed also by some authorities that the Pelasgi 
were the original architects and builders of the "Long 
Walls" that connected Athens with her seaport gates, 
and of such parts of the peribolus as were not the au- 
thentic work of the builders under Themistocles and 
Cimon, and subsequent architects to be hereafter men- 
tioned. 

The Cyclopses, who belonged to Pelasgic times, were 
likewise remarkable wall-builders, lending their name 
to a kind of mural work in a manner original with them, 
and having the attributes of great solidity and endur- 
ance. The ruins of houses and other structures erected 
by them have been found also at Tiryus and Mycenae, 
on the plain of Argos. 

Speaking of the circuit wall at Tiryus, Pausanias 
describes it as being "composed of unwrought stones, 



26 SOME OLD MASTERS 



each of Avhich is so large that a team of mules cannot 
even shake the smallest one ;" and of Mycena?, the more 
important city, a short distance from Tiryus, where the 
circular treasury of Atreus and other evidences of Cy- 
clopean architecture have been excavated by Dr. Henry 
Schliemann, Euripides asks the question : "Do you call 
the city of Perseus the handiwork of the Cyclopes ?" 

Modern archaeologists are inclined to the opinion that 
the Cyclopean builders were not, as originally supposed, 
the one-eyed giants whom Ulysses encountered in his 
voyages, as related in the Homeric legends, but an en- 
tirely distinct Thracian tribe, which derived its name 
from king Cyclops. After being expelled from Thrace, 
where were their early homes, they migrated to Crete 
and Lycia ; thence following the fortunes of Proetus, and 
giving him protection with the gigantic walls which they 
constructed as against Acrisius, his twin brother, who 
was very quarrelsome, as twin brothers not often are. 

These Cyclopean walls, which are still to be found 
throughout Greece, as already stated, and also in some 
parts of Italy, were made of huge, uncut polygonous 
stones, sometimes twenty or thirty feet wide, piled upon 
each other without cement, frequently irregularly, with 
smaller stones filling up the interstices, but occasion- 
idly in regular horizontal rows. There were, in fact, 






OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 27 

not only several kinds of these walls, bnt several eras 
in which they were bnilt as well. 

It is not, however, the intention here to discuss the 
nature and extent of the Pelasgic and Cyclopean con- 
structions, it being sufficient to recall the fact that so far 
as the Pelasgians generally are concerned, they were not 
only the progenitors of most of the early architectural 
monuments of eastern Europe, but were skilled in the 
arts and learned in the fables of the gods as well, be- 
queathing both religious rites and many arts to their 
children, the Greeks. It remains only to add, also, that 
so closely were they identified with the art of building 
that it is believed their very name is derived from their 
leading pursuit, for it is thought that the term Pelasgi 
may be interpreted to mean "stone-builders" or "stone- 
workers." 

In this allusion to the Pelasgians as builders, it was 
stated at the outset that the names of the individual 
architects among them are not known ; this was perhaps 
unfair to ^Eacus, if he can be ranked as an architect, and 
who is classed as a Pelasgian, although of divine par- 
entage. 

^Eacus was a son of Jupiter by -Egina, daughter of 
the river god, Asopus, and, like the Cyclopeans, he was 
particularly expert in the matter of walls. He was as 



28 SOME OLD MASTERS 

well a very just and pious individual or myth, who was 
frequently called upon to hold the scales of justice, not 
only as between mortals, but also immortals. He was 
born on the Island of ^Egina, the temporary residence 
of his mother, after whom it was named. At the time 
of his birth the island was uninhabited. This very un- 
pleasant condition of isolation for the mother and son 
was quickly remedied by Jupiter, who changed the ants 
that abounded there into men, placing ^Eacus over them 
as king. 

^Eacus always kept on the very best of terms with tin- 
gods, propitiating them in many ways, and at last be- 
coming a great favorite with them. Indeed, so strong 
was his influence in celestial circles that at one time 
when Greece was afflicted with a drought, in consequence 
of a murder that had been committed, the Delphic oracle 
declared that the only person who could help the situa- 
tion at all was ^Eacus. He was accordingly appealed 
to and persuaded to petition the gods for relief. The 
result was that his petition was favorably answered. 
uEacus thereupon erected a temple to Zeus Panhelle- 
nius on Mount Panhellenion to show his gratitude, and 
possibly to keep himself in that position where he might 
trespass upon the good-nature of his heavenly friends 
again at some future time, should there be necessity. 



OF GKEEK ARCHITECTURE. 29 

iEacus surrounded his island with high walls to 
protect his people against pirates. It is probable that 
these walls attracted the admiration of Apollo and Nep- 
tune, and prompted them to retain the professional 
services of their builder to assist them in erecting the 
walls of Troy. But here it was that ^Eacus failed, for 
as one diamond can only bo accurately judged when 
placed in comparison with another diamond, so ^Eacus, 
however successful he may have been as a wall-builder 
by himself, was outclassed when he came into com- 
petition with the occult knowledge of Apollo and Nep- 
tune. 

The story is that when the Trojan walls were com- 
pleted, three dragons appeared and rushed upon them 
to test their strength. The two dragons which attacked 
those parts of the walls built by the celestial associates 
of ^Eacus had their heads broken for their pains, but the 
one which flew at the mortars share of the work made a 
hole in the wall which let it into the city. Apollo at once 
prophesied that Troy would eventually fall through the 
hands of the ^Eacids, which prophecy, of course, proved 
true. Whether this failure had anything to do with the 
future of ^Eacus or not, it would be difficult to say, but 
the fact is that after his death he became one of the three 
judges in Hades, with special jurisdiction over the 



30 SOME OLD MASTERS 

Europeans, which necessarily insured his being over- 
worked until the end of time. 

With a people possessed of so large and varied an 
assortment of deities, suited to every possible human 
need and shade of mortal endeavor, it would be strange 
indeed if there was not some mythical or legendary 
character among the Greek gods to preside over archi- 
tecture, if not as a distinct art, at all events in 
association with some of its kindred branches. That 
the Greeks did not ignore such a necessity is found to 
have been the case, and the great Daedalus rises most 
admirably to the occasion in personifying the early 
infancy of architecture as well as sculpture and wood- 
carving. 

Daedalus, like most of his spiritual relations and asso- 
ciates, led a life of much romance and adventure, not un- 
mixed with hardship and trial. He was either a native 
Athenian or Cretan, a point upon which there is some 
dispute, as well as upon another involving his parentage. 
It is perhaps sufficient to know that Daedalus flourished 
in the age of Minos and Theseus, and was introduced 
more or less into the legends pertaining to those two 
early characters. 

It is upon Da?dalus that responsibility must rest for 
the first introduction of jealousy into the personality of 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 31 

artists, a vice, by the way, which they have never been 
quite able to shake off from his time to the present. 
Daxlalus was rather sorely afflicted with this unfortunate 
trait, and to its early exhibition is due much of his sub- 
sequent misfortune. It was in connection with his de- 
votion to sculpture that his jealousy first involved him 
in trouble. He became very expert as a carver generally, 
and undertook to instruct his nephew Perdix in the art. 
In due time and under the careful tutorage of his 
uncle, Perdix also became proficient, and in a moment 
of inspiration is said to have invented that very useful 
tool of the mechanic, the saw. This it was that excited 
Daxlalus, who, in a fit of jealous rage, threw his nephew 
over the Pelasgic walls of the Acropolis, killing him in- 
stantly as he supposed. 

Daxlalus was, of course, condemned to death for this 
unseemly and cruel manifestation of envy, but managed 
to escape and fly to Crete. There his professional rep- 
utation had preceded him, and he obtained the friendship 
of king Minos. In Crete he developed his latent archi- 
tectural skill, and built a very elaborate and intricate 
dwelling for the hideous monster Minotaur, since known 
as the celebrated labyrinth at Cnossus. The story of 
how Theseus, with the connivance of Ariadne, the 
charming daughter of Minos, slew this monster, is one 



32 SOME OLD MASTERS 

of the most thrilling of the mythological legends, and is 
quite familiar. 

Just how Dredalus incurred the displeasure of Minos 
does not seem to he very clearly stated by the early au- 
thorities. It appears that he was in some way entangled 
with the creation of a wooden cow, also with Pasiphae, 
the wife of Minos, and even with the birth of the hor- 
rible Minotaur. Possibly it may have been Minos who 
this time became jealous. However that may be, the 
friendship which had existed between Da?dalus and the 
king finally became strained, and the former was com- 
pelled to fly the country, which he did in a very literal 
way, as king Minos had seized all the ships on the coast 
of the island, cutting off, in consequence, the only means 
of escape. The architect, however, possessed much in- 
genuity and inventive genius of his own, even to a more 
marked degree than that manifested by the nephew he 
had dropped over the Athenian precipice, and with the 
aid of some feathers, a little wax, and Pasiphae, who se- 
cretly contributed her assistance, he manufactured a 
pair of wings for himself, and another pair for his son, 
Icarus, who was with him at the time. Thus it will be 
seen that the first flying machines were invented by an 
architect. 

When the father and son started for Sicily, over the 




THE FLIGHT OF DJEDALUS AXIJ ICARUS. 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 



33 



JSgean sea, like a pair of huge birds, Daedalus flew con- 
servatively and cautiously, being careful not to rise too 
near the sun, where it was supposed by the ancients to 
be very hot ; but Icarus, with the spirit of youth and the 
enjoyment of the exhilaration consequent upon the nov- 
elty of his method of locomotion, gave a deaf ear to the 
protests of his father, and, in emulation of Apollo, 
soared so high that the sun melted the wax in his wings. 
His feathers flew off, and down he dropped into the 
waves below. He was drowned, and that part of the 
.Egean sea into which he fell was afterward called the 
Icarian sea, in commemoration of this unfortunate acci- 
dent, which Darwin lias so well described in verse: 
"... With melting wax and loosened strings, 
Sunk hapless Icarus on unfaithful wings ; 
Headlong he rushed through the affrighted air, 
With limbs distorted and dishevelled hair; 
His scattered plumage danced upon the wave, 
And sorrowing Nereids decked his watery grave. 
O'er his pale corse their pearly sea-flowers shed, 
And strewed with crimson moss his marble bed ; 
Struck in their coral towers the passing bell, 
And wide in ocean tolled his echoing knell." 

Daxlalus, who could not stop to rescue his son, con- 
tinued steadily on his course, and, attempting no experi- 
ments with his frail wings, finally landed safely in 
Sicily, where he established himself again, profession- 



34 SOME OLD MASTERS 

ally, under the royal patronage of Cocalus, king of the 
Sicani. Here he did most excellent work, until king 
Minos, his old enemy, found him out, and began to make 
it unpleasant for him again. Minos, hearing that 
Daedalus was in Sicily, sailed with a great fleet to that 
island, but fortunately for the architect, his enemy was 
murdered as soon as he arrived there by Cocalus or his 
daughter. In the mean time Da?dalus, anticipating the 
trouble that was in store for him, again made an escape, 
this time to Sardinia, where he tarried a while, but 
finally visited other countries, notably Egypt. 

These are the substantial facts of Daedalus's career, as 
contained in the earlier legends, but later Greek writers 
tell a much more fanciful and improbable story of his 
life, which there is no urgent necessity to believe, as the 
one mentioned is quite fanciful enough and probably 
more authentic. They say, among other things, that 
Daxlalus was an astrologer, and that he taught his son 
that science, who, soaring above plain truths, lost his 
wits and was drowned in an abyss of difficulties. 

Da?dalus may have been an astrologer and may have 
been other things as well, but that he was an architect 
cannot be doubted from the fact that so many buildings 
are ascribed to him. Among his works may be men- 
tioned the Colymbethra, or reservoir in Sicily, from 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 35 

which the river Alabon flowed into the sea; another 
an impregnable city near Agrigentum, in which was the 
royal palace of Cocalns; still another a cave in the terri- 
tory of Selinus, in which the vapor arising from a 
subterranean fire was received in such a way as to an- 
swer for a vapor bath. He enlarged the summit of 
Mount Eryx for a foundation for the temple of Venus, 
and he is said to have been the author of the temples of 
Apollo at Capua and Cumse, and the temple of Artemis 
Britomartis in Crete. In Egypt he was the architect 
of a very beautiful propylaeum, or vestibule to the tem- 
ple of Hephaestus at Memphis, for which he was re- 
warded by being permitted to erect in it. a statue of him- 
self, the work of his own hands. 

As a sculptor he also executed many works of art — 
but the architectural side of his career can only be con- 
sidered here. It will not be out of place, however, to 
mention some of the inventions ascribed to him to assist 
the mechanic. It is claimed for him that he was an 
expert carpenter, having been taught that trade by 
Minerva, and that he originated the axe, the plumb-line, 
the auger and glue. 

Dsedalus, in fact, seems to have personified the earliest 
Grecian art, and his name, which, when translated, sig- 
nifies "ingenious," or "inventive," stands for that 



36 



SOME OLD MASTERS 



period in Greece when form and shape and expression 
were given inanimate substances by the use of tools 
and mechanical appliances. 

When Daedalus threw his nephew over the high walls 
of the Acropolis, and naturally thought that he had killed 
him — an opinion in which it is apparent the people of 
Athens shared — he was very much mistaken, for Mi- 
nerva, the patron goddess of the city, realizing what a 
great mistake it would be to allow so bright and promis- 
ing a young man to go to an early death, exercised her 
magic, and saved him by changing the falling artisan 
into a bird, which was given his name, "Perdix," or, as 
translated, Partridge. 

To Perdix, who was especially skilful as a worker in 
wood, is attributed, in addition to the invention of the 
saw, suggested to him by the backbone of a fish or the 
teeth of a serpent, it would be difficult to say which, the 
chisel, the compasses and the potter's wheel. Whether 
he invented any of these things after he became a par- 
tridge or not is another mythical uncertainty, but prob- 
ably not, as his changed condition and feathers would 
have made it very awkward for him to have done so, al- 
though most anything was possible in those days. 

Perdix is also called Talos by some writers, and Pau- 
sanias mentions him by still another name, Calos, and 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 37 

states that after his death he was buried somewhere on 
the road leading from the theatre in Athens to the 
Acropolis. 

It might be interesting, but certainly a task beyond 
the scope of this book, to mention all the mythical per- 
sonages of the archaic or early period of Grecian art, 
who were in a way more or less remote, responsible for 
special features of artistic treatment that graced the 
buildings of that time, such, for instance, as Dibutades, 
who was the first to make masks on the edges of gutter 
tiles. Dibutades was a sculptor, and the idea which he 
originated is said to have been suggested to him by 
seeing his daughter trace the lines of her lover's profile 
around the shadow which it cast upon a wall. He filled 
in the lines with clay, and, moulding it to the face, gave 
to the world the art of modelling. 

Among the artists belonging to the Dsedalien, or leg- 
endary period of Greece, who may be classed more dis- 
tinctively as architects, however, were Polycritus, who 
had to do with the building of the town of Tanagra by 
Poemander, and Pteras, who was supposed to have been 
the architect of the second temple to Apollo at Delphi. 
The legend is that the first temple was made of branches 
of the wild laurel from Tempe, and that Pteras con- 
structed the second of wax and bees' wings — rather an 



38 SOME OLD MASTERS 

unsubstantial building material, it might be inferred. 
Eucheir, a painter, and Ohersiphron and Smilis, archi- 
tects and statuaries, are also of this traditional period, 
and were representative of skill in their arts. 

All these names, however, although supposed to have 
been originally purely mythological, were probably later 
assumed by or given to mortals who were specially ex- 
pert in the particular branch of art which the name 
taken suggested. These individuals, to complicate mat- 
ters, no doubt, became entangled with the early mytho- 
logical stories, and finally lost their identity completely, 
or to such an extent as to make it quite impossible to 
separate the fact from the fiction in their respective 
cases. 

An illustration of such a confusion is to be found in 
respect to the architects, Rhoocus and Theodoras, who 
had to do with the building of the temple of Hera at 
Samos, for the worship of which goddess Samos was 
celebrated, and who, in association with Smilis, were the 
architects of the labyrinth at Lemnos. 

The writers who have mentioned these artists are 
quite numerous, and have so differed in respect to their 
dates, and confounded the accounts of their careers and 
achievements, that it is difficult to sift anything like a 
satisfactory- storv from the confusion created. The 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 39 

most probable deduction that has been made, however, 
is that Rhcecus flourished about 640 B.C., and was a son 
of Phileas of Samos ; that Theodoras, the architect, was 
his son, and that another Theodoras, a statuary, some- 
times mistaken for the architect, was a nephew of the 
architect Theodoras, the son of Telecles, also a gifted 
sculptor, and a grandson of Rhcecus. 

The temple of Hera, alluded to as the work of the 
father and son, was three hundred and forty-four feet 
long by one hundred and sixty feet wide, and, according 
to the "Antiquities of Ionia," a decastyle, dipteral 
structure, or possessed of a double row of columns com- 
posed of ten columns in each row. Pausanias thinks 
that the temple was of very great antiquity, a fact ap- 
parent to him from the statue of Hera which it con- 
tained, which was made by Smilis, of wood, as were the 
early statues of Greece. ■ 

The Lemnian labyrinth, according to Pliny, con- 
tained fifty columns and innumerable statues, and had 
very remarkable massive gates, so delicately poised that 
a child might open or shut them. Modern travellers 
have had difficulty in finding any trace of this laby- 
rinth, although there is little doubt that it once existed. 
It is not to be classed with the more visionary labyrinth 
in which the Minotaur was cased. 



40 SOME OLD MASTERS 

It is claimed for both Rhoecus and Theodoras that 
they were the first to invent the art of casting statues in 
bronze or iron, but as this art was known before their 
time by the Phoenicians, it is likely that they were re- 
sponsible for nothing more than having introduced it 
into Greece. This is probably true also of other early 
mythical characters of Greece, to whom is attributed 
certain inventions in the arts which have been found 
since to have existed much earlier than their time in 
Egypt or elsewhere. 

Theodoras is also credited with having been the archi- 
tect of the old Scias at Sparta, and of having advised 
the use of charcoal beneath the foundation of the temple 
dedicated to Artemis, atEphesus, as a remedy against the 
dampness of the site. Theodoras was a great admirer of 
his father and of the temple to Hera, which they built 
together. He attested his appreciation of the latter by 
writing a book descriptive of it. 

As for Smilis, who belongs to the mythical period, 
and whose name when translated stands for "a knife 
for carving wood," or "a sculptor's chisel,'' he is also 
accredited with having been the first to devise the art of 
modelling in clay. He is to be classed more as a sculp- 
tor than an architect, but of an inferior standing to 
Da?dalus. In fact, his only connection with architec- 



OF GKEEK ARCHITECTURE. 41 

ture, according to Pliny, seems to have been his asso- 
ciation with Rhoecus and Theodoras in the buildine; 
of the labyrinth at Lemnos. It is possible that even 
here lie was employed more in the line of a sculptor 
than in lending any professional assistance as an archi- 
tect. 

Pausanias mentions a pupil of Theodoras of Samos, 
who, it would appear, achieved considerable distinction 
both as an architect and sculptor, but more especially in 
the latter capacity. His name is given as Gitiadas, and 
his birthplace as Laceda?mon, where he nourished about 
724 b.c, as stated by some authorities, but much later 
according to others. The architectural work for which 
he receives credit was the temple of Athena Polionchos 
at Sparta, which, it is said, was constructed entirely of 
bronze. It also contained a bronze statue of the goddess 
of Gitiadas's own workmanship, and many bas-reliefs 
representing the labors of Hercules, the exploits of the 
Tyndarids, Hephsestus releasing his mother from her 
chains, the Nymphs arming Perseus for the expedition 
against Medusa, and other mythological subjects, all 
executed in the same metal. This extensive use of 
bronze suggested the name ''Brazen House," which was 
given the temple. It would seem that Gitiadas was pos- 
sessed of other accomplishments, and served Minerva 



42 SOME OLD MASTERS 

with equal distinction as a poet, writing his poems all in 
the Doric dialect. 

A still stranger compote of fact and fable, of 
hypothesis and conjecture, of celestial and terrestrial 
biography, is to be found in the accounts of the Irothers 
Agamedes and Trophonius, who were the architects of 
the great temple of Apollo at Delphi, and of the treas- 
ury of Hyrieus, king of Hyria in Boeotia. 

The temple to the beautiful and accomplished son of 
Jupiter and Latona, the god of music and prophecy, as 
well as other things of equal or less consequence, was the 
fourth to be erected upon the same site on Mount 
Parnassus, in the ancient city of Delphi, known to the 
older poets as Pytho, a name derived from the serpent 
Python which Apollo slew. In this temple, which was 
the first of the four to be built with stone, the others 
having been constructed out of the branches of the bay 
tree and other equally perishable materials, dwelt the 
much respected and frequently consulted Delphic 
Oracle. The spot in the temple from which the 
prophetic vapor issued to inspire the priestess with 
second sight was said to be the central point of the 
earth, and that where the two eagles despatched by 
Jupiter to ascertain that point met and fell. 

Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, who gave mouth to 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 43 

the oracles, sat on a sacred tripod placed over the open- 
ing from which the vapor issued, and gave forth her 
words of wisdom in prose or poetry as the occasion de- 
manded. If in prose, her prognostications would be im- 
mediately verified, and if in verse some time must 
elapse before they could be fulfilled. Pythia was not 
always on duty, but could be consulted only on certain 
days during the month of Busius in the spring. 

There is no doubt but that she made some very re- 
markable prophecies, but, alas ! it is also recorded that, 
like some of the political oracles of these degenerate 
times, her prophetic vision was not infrequently in- 
fluenced by "a previous interview." A notable case of 
this kind was that in which the Alcma^onida? were en- 
tangled ; who for political reasons and effect rebuilt the 
same temple after it was destroyed by fire in the year 
548 b.c, as we shall see later. 

But we have drifted from the subject. It is claimed 
by some that Agamedes was the son of Stymphalus, who 
was murdered and had his body cut up in pieces, and a 
grandson of the old ancestor of the Arcadian Areas, who 
in turn was a son of Zeus. Others say that the father 
of Agamedes was Apollo, and his mother was Epicaste, 
and still others are of the opinion that his parents were 
none other than Zeus himself and Iocaste, another name 



44 SOME OLD MASTERS 

for Epicaste, and that Trophonius was his son. All this 
genealogy is, however, disturbed if we accept the more 
probable one, that he was a son of Erginus, king of 
Orchomenus, and that he was a brother of Trophonius. 
By the way, Trophonius is also said to have been a son 
of . Apollo. When these two young men attained to 
manhood they became very expert in the art of build- 
ing temples to the gods and palaces for kings. Thus 
having established enviable reputations in their pro- 
fession, they were retained to plan and supervise the 
works mentioned. 

It is in respect to these architects that the first au- 
thentic account of a misunderstanding as to professional 
compensation is related. It must not be thought that 
because some of the early architects were related to 
the nobility of Mount Olympus, they were any the less 
mercenary than are architects in our own time, or were 
any more inclined to work for nothing than are their 
professional descendants of to-day. 

Plutarch tells us that Agamedes and Trophonius, 
after working hard upon the Delphic temple, and not 
receiving any pay, began to lose faith in the mortals who 
were backing the undertaking. As they grew more and 
more dubious about their compensation, and possibly 
having notes or bills to meet, they finally decided to 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 45 

appeal directly to Apollo, in whose glorification the 
shrine had been built. 

Apollo, who was consulted through the Delphic 
Oracle, informed them that he must have time to think 
the matter over. In other words, he could not be hurried 
in his decision, but would give them an answer at the 
end of seven days. It is not unlikely that the Oracle 
saw an occasion here where it might be a matter of 
financial prudence to consult with the other side before 
rendering a decision. However that may be, the two 
architects were told that Apollo wished that they should 
spend the intervening time in "festive indulgence." 
Thinking from this, quite naturally, that they were in 
the good graces of the god, and suspecting no ungodly 
duplicity, Agamedes and Trophonius set about to enjoy 
themselves according to the most liberal interpretation 
of their instructions. The result was that at the end 
of the seventh day they were found dead in their beds, 
whether from too much festivity on their part or too 
much duplicity on the part of the Oracle, no one knows, 
but the inference is conclusive that as they were dead it 
was not necessary to give them the professional com- 
pensation they had been so anxiously demanding. 

Cicero tells the story a little differently, and elimi- 
nates the question of compensation from it. He says that 



46 SOME OLD MASTERS 

they consulted Apollo to know what in his opinion was 
''best for man" ? This being a much easier question to 
handle, Apollo took but three days to answer it, but the 
consequences of the consultation to poor Agamedes and 
Trophonius were quite as disastrous. It may be that, 
taking everything into consideration, it is best for man 
to be dead, but most architects don't think so, and had 
Agamedes and Trophonius anticipated such an answer, 
it is probable that they would have asked no questions. 

Pausanias relates an altogether different legend and 
connects it with the treasury of Hyrieus, which Agam- 
edes and Trophonius built, instead of with the temple 
of Apollo. The story by Pausanias would tend to show 
that these architects were even more mercenary than 
Plutarch has siven us to understand thev were. 

It seems that in constructing the treasury they con- 
trived to have a stone so placed that it could be taken 
away from the outside of the building at any time, and 
thus offer an entrance to the vaults. Xo one of course 
had any knowledge of this secret entrance but. them- 
selves. In consequence, after the building was finished, 
and it was used for the purpose for which it was in- 
tended, these two covetous brothers carried away from 
time to time goodly portions of the treasure as it was de- 
posited. The king soon heard that there was a leak in 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 47 

his treasury, and that he was losing money rapidly. lie 
was naturally annoyed and much perplexed when he 
found that the locks and seals of his treasure house re- 
mained intact and uninjured. He thereupon set a 
trap to catch the thief. Just what kind of a trap 
it was is not explained, but after some little time 
Agamedes was caught, and Trophonius, finding his 
brother ensnared, cut off his head, to save his own, 
doubtless, and prevent the discovery of his association 
in the robbery. This very unfraternal act of Tropho- 
nius was not allowed to go unpunished, however, and 
Apollo, or some other god, caused him to be swallowed 
up in the grove of Lebadea. 

Pausanias further states that Erginus, the father of 
Agamedes, was known as the "Protector of Labor," that 
Trophonius was called the "Xourisher," and that Agam- 
edes had the reputation of being the "Very Prudent 
One." There can be no doubt about Agamedes's pru- 
dence, such as it was. 

Trophonius, it appears, had a still further career after 
his death, as an oracle, conducting his business from the 
spot where he was swallowed up in Lebadea. lie was 
especially prophetic in matters relating to futurity. 
Those desiring to consult him were conducted to a 
cavern, and furnished with a ladder, by means of which 



48 SOME OLD MASTEES 

they could descend into it. They were then given the 
information for which they were in quest, either by 
means of their eyes, or their ears, or such of their senses 
as the occasion seemed best to suggest. Some say that 
one of these visitors, after having gone into the cave, 
and being treated in this way by the oracle, returned 
never to smile again ; but Pausanias contradicts the 
story. 

There is another belief in regard to these architects 
which must be simply alluded to. It is that Agamedes 
and Trophonius were deities of the Pelasgian times; 
that Trophonius was a giver of food from the bosom of 
the earth, and for that reason was worshipped in a 
cavern, and that Agamedes was not the wretched thief of 
Pausanias, but, on the contrary, a very generous char- 
acter, who gave liberally from underground granaries. 

A parallel to the story of the robbery of the treasury 
of Hyrieus by Agamedes and Trophonius is told by 
Herodotus in respect to the two sons of the builder 
of the treasury of the Egyptian king Rhampsinitus. 
These two young men, it seems, were also caught, while 
pilfering, in a trap, described with great circumstan- 
tiality by the "Father of History." 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 49 




CHAPTER III. 

The Originators of the Three Orders. 

HO were the originators of the three great 
and primary orders of Grecian architecture is 
still a question which the discussion of the 
legendary and mythical architects, which has been 
briefly entered into, has not answered. It may be as- 
sumed inferentially that as the earliest of the Greek 
temples which have been referred to as the works of the 
progeny of the gods were in the Doric style, the pagan 
deities of Greece may claim some share of credit for 
having introduced that noble design to the world. The 
Ionic and Corinthian styles, however, are still to be 
accounted for, and as there is good ground to assume 
that they made their advent into architectural art at 
much later dates no celestial origin can be claimed for 
them. 

Vitruvius, in relating his account of the origin of all 
three orders, alludes more directly to the birth of the 
Doric, and tells a story so picturesque and entertaining 



50 SOME OLD MASTERS 

of the other two that although recognizing how well it 
may be known to the professional architect, it is difficult 
to resist the temptation to give it here entire : 

"Dorus, the son of Hellen, and the nymph Orseis, 
reigned over the whole of Achaia and Peloponnesus, and 
built at Argos, an ancient city, on a spot sacred to Juno, 
a temple which happened to be of this order. After this 
many temples similar to it sprung up in the other parts 
of Achaia, though the proportions which should be pre- 
served in it were not as yet settled. 

"But afterward when the Athenians, by the advice 
of the Delphic Oracle in a general assembly of the dif- 
ferent states of Greece, sent over into Asia thirteen colo- 
nies at once, and appointed a governor or leader to each, 
reserving the chief command for Ion, the son of Xuthus 
and Creusa, whom the Delphic Apollo had acknowledged 
as son, that person led them over into Asia, and occu- 
pied the borders of Caria, and there built the great 
cities of Ephesus, Miletus, Myus (which was long since 
destroyed by inundation, and its sacred rites and suf- 
frages transferred by the Ionians to the inhabitants 
of Miletus), Priene, Samos, Teos, Colophon, Chios, 
Erythra 3 , Phoca?a, Clazomena\ Lebedos and Melite. 
The last, as a punishment for the arrogance of its citi- 
zens, was detached from the other states in a war- levied 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 51 

pursuant to the directions of a general council ; and in 
its place, as a mark of favor toward King Attalus and 
Arsinoe, the city of Smyrna was admitted into the 
number of Ionian states, which received the appellation 
of Ionian from their leader Ion, after the Carians and 
Lelegse had been driven out. 

u In this country, allotting different spots for sacred 
purposes, they began to erect temples, the first of which 
was dedicated to Apollo Panionios, and resembled that 
which they had seen in Achaia, and they gave it the 
name of Doric, because they had first seen that species 
in the cities of Doria. As they wished to erect this 
temple with columns, and had not a knowledge of the 
proper proportions of them, nor knew the way in which 
they ought to be constructed, so as at the same time to 
be both fit to carry the superincumbent weight and to 
produce a beautiful effect, they measured a man's foot, 
and, finding its length the sixth part of his height, they 
gave the column a similar proportion — that is, they 
made its height, including the capital, six times the 
thickness of the shaft, measured at the base. Thus the 
Doric order obtained its proportion, its strength, and 
its beauty from the human figure. 

"Under similar notions they afterward built the 
temple of Diana, but in that, seeking a new proportion, 



52 SOME OLD MASTERS 

they used the female figure as the standard ; and for the 
purpose of producing a more lofty effect they first made 
it eight times its thickness in height. Under it they 
placed a base, after the manner of a shoe to the foot ; 
they also added volutes to its capital, like graceful, curl- 
ing hair, on each side, and the front they ornamented 
with cymatia and festoons in the place of hair. On 
the shafts they sunk channels, which bear a resemblance 
to the folds of a matronal garment. Thus two orders 
were invented, one of a masculine character, without 
ornament, the other bearing a character which resem- 
bled the delicacy, ornament and proportion of a female. 

"The successors of these people, improving in taste, 
and preferring a more slender proportion, assigned 
seven diameters to the height of the Doric column and 
eight and a half to the Ionic. That species, of which 
the Ionians were the inventors, has received the appella- 
tion of Ionic. 

"The third species, which is called Corinthian, re- 
sembles in its character the graceful and elegant appear- 
ance of a virgin, in whom, from her tender age, the 
limbs are of a more delicate form, and whose ornaments 
should be unobtrusive. The invention of the capital of 
this order is said to be founded on the following occur- 
rence: A Corinthian virgin, of a marriageable age, fell 




THE ORIGIN OF THE CORINTHIAN CAPITAL. 



OF GEEEK ARCHITECTURE. 53 

a victim to a violent disorder. After her interment her 
nurse, collecting in a basket those articles to which she 
had shown a partiality when alive, carried them to her 
tomb, and placed a tile on the basket for the longer 
preservation of its contents. The basket was accident- 
ally placed on the root of an acanthus plant, which, 
pressed by the weight, shot forth, toward spring, its 
stems and large foliage, and in the course of its growth 
reached the angles of the tile, and thus formed volutes 
at the extremities. Callimachus, who for his great in- 
genuity and taste was called by the Athenians Cate- 
technos, happening at this time to pass by the tomb, 
observed the basket and the delicacy of the foliage which 
surrounded it. Pleased with the form and novelty of 
the combination, he constructed from the hint thus 
afforded columns of this species in the country about 
Corinth." 

The comments of Sir Henry Wotton in his "Elements 
of Architecture," written in England during the latter 
part of the sixteenth century, upon this legendary ac- 
count of the source of the three orders given by Vitru- 
vius, are sufficiently attractive and quaint in language 
and spelling to warrant their being quoted also : 

"The Dorique order is the gravest that hath been 
received into civil use, preserving in comparison of those 



54 SOME OLD MASTERS 

that follow a more masculine aspect and little trimmer 
than the Tuscan that went before, save a sober garnish- 
ment now and then of lions' heads in the cornice and of 
triglyph and metopes always in the frize. ... To 
discern him will be a piece rather of good heraldry than 
of architecture, for he is knowne by his place when he 
is in company and by the peculiar ornament of his 
frize, before mentioned, when he is alone. . . . The 
lonique order doth represent a kind of feminine slender- 
ness ; yet, saith Vitruvius, not like a housewife, but in 
a decent dressing hath much of the matrone. 
Best known by his trimmings for the bodie of this col- 
umne is perpetually chaneled, like a thick-pleighted 
gowne. The jcap it all , dressed on each side, not much 
unlike women's wires, in a spiral wreathing, which they 
call the Ionian voluta. . . . The Corinthian is a 
columne lasciviously decked like a courtezan, and there- 
fore in much participating (as all inventions do) of 
the place where they were first born, Corinth having 
beene, without controversie, one of the wantonest towns 
in the world." 

As for the Composite order, which, as has been al- 
ready stated, is but a mixture of the Ionic and Corin- 
thian, it would seem that Sir Henry has very little 
patience. He says with a contempt which he makes 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 55 

little effort to conceal: "The last is the compounded 
order, his name being a briefe of his nature: for his 
pillar is nothing in effect but a medlie, or an amasse of 
all the preceding ornaments, making a new kinde of 
stealth, and though the most richly tricked, yet the poor- 
est in this, that he is a borrower of his beautie." 

There are those who in relentless search for truth 
at the expense of sentiment and poetry would spoil the 
pretty story which Vitruvius tells of the invention of 
the Corinthian capital by claiming for Egypt the dis- 
tinction of being the mother-country of the order, and 
ascribing to that form of the Egyptian capital that bells 
out toward the abacus, and which is surrounded by open 
lotus leaves, as the archetype of- the last of the three 
Grecian orders. There is, however, more probability to 
the story of Callimachus than there is similarity be- 
tween the Egyptian and Corinthian capitals, in our 
opinion. 

If we accept Callimachus as the originator of the 
Corinthian, although there does not appear any name 
of an architect to receive the individual credit for the 
invention of the Doric order, we may as well accept the 
deduction which Vitruvius draws in respect to Her- 
mogenes, an Ionian architect, who is said to have flour- 
ished about 600 B.C., and credit him at the same time 



56 SOME OLD MASTERS 

with being the first to introduce the feminine propor- 
tions and attributes into his art, and with having per- 
fected, if he did not originate, the queenly Ionic order. 

"When Hermogenes was employed to erect the temple 
of Bacchus at Teos," says Vitruvius, "the marbls was 
prepared for one in the Doric style ; but the architect 
changed his mind, from the idea that other proportions, 
afterward called Ionic, were more suitable for the pur- 
pose, almost inducing the inference that Hermogenes 
was the inventor of those delicate proportions ; he ap- 
pears unquestionably to have displayed great skill and 
ingenuity in all his designs, and to have entertained the 
opinion that sacred buildings should not be constructed 
with Doric proportions, as they obliged the adoption of 
false and incongruous arrangements." 

Another fact which Vitruvius does not touch upon 
might tend to point to Hermogenes as the originator of 
the Ionic order. He was a native of Alabanda in Caria, 
and if it is true, as some authorities believe, the volute 
was an ornament in early use in Asia Minor, he was 
doubtless familiar with it ; and, appreciating its grace- 
ful possibilities, introduced it into the matronly Ionic. 

Hermogenes is conceded to have been one of the most 
celebrated architects of antiquity. In addition to the 
temple of Bacchus which he designed for Teos, one of 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 57 

the eastern Ionian cities, and the birthplace of Anac- 
reon, as well as other noted ancient characters, he 
erected in the city of Magnesia, in Lydia, a temple to 
Diana in the Doric order. About each of these temples 
he wrote a book, both of which were still in existence 
in the time of Augustus. In one he described the temple, 
to Diana as a pseudodipteral, or false dipteral temple, a 
form which he invented. It is called false or imperfect 
because of the economy of the inside row of columns on 
each of the long sides of the cell, the outside row being 
allowed to remain. The effect from a distance was the 
same as a double row, while considerable expense was 
saved. The temple to Bacchus he described as a mon- 
opterus, or a round temple, having neither walls nor 
cell, but merely a roof sustained by columns. 

Hermogenes's great ambition appears to> have been 
a desire to foster and encourage the use of the Ionic 
order in preference to the Doric for temple construction. 
In this opinion he was later sustained by Tarchesius, 
another writer on architecture, who may be dated as 
sometime later than 470 b.c, and by Pytheus, whom 
Ave shall meet again as one of the architects of the tomb 
of Mausolus. 

Although Vitruvius mentions the origin of the Co- 
rinthian order in close connection with that of the Doric 



58 SOME OLD MASTERS 

and Ionic, it must be borne in mind that Callimachus, 
whom he credits with the Corinthian, was a much later 
artist than Hermogenes. The use of the Corinthian 
column by the architect Scopas in the temple of Athene 
at Tegea in 396 B.C., has led to the inference that Cal- 
limachus must have lived prior to that date, and the fact 
that he gave to that style of architecture the appellation 
of Corinthian, that he was a native of Corinth. Liibke. 
in his "Outlines of the History of Art," however, does 
not give to Callimachus the full and undisputed credit 
for originating the Corinthian style, claiming that the 
order existed before his time, although he does not men- 
tion when or where. Liibke would interpret the story 
of Callimachus and the basket as meaning that it was 
he who gave to the capital its final perfection. It is 
somewhat strange also that although Callimachus is 
conceded to have been the first to develop this order, if 
he did not absolutely invent it, there is no mention of 
any building having been designed bv him in the Co- 
rinthian style. 

There seems to be little dispute over the fact that 
Callimachus was neither as a sculptor nor an architect 
to be placed in the van of the distinguished artists of 
early Greece. As a sculptor, in which capacity he is 
best known by his works, his style was stilted and arti- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 59 

flcial, rendered so by the artist's disposition to be finicky 
and fastidious in his execution. Indeed, he is said to 
have been unwearied in polishing and perfecting, and to 
have sacrificed the grand and sublime in the exercise 
of too great refinement and purity. Callimachus was 
never satisfied with himself, and possibly on that ac- 
count others were not satisfied with him, as a certain 
degree of self-esteem is necessary to invite public ap- 
proval. The Greeks gave him a name, based upon his 
peculiarities, which Pliny has translated as "Calumni- 
ator Sui." His faculty for invention was evidenced 
in other respects also, as he is credited with having origi- 
nated the art of boring marble, and Pausanius describes 
a golden lamp which he invented, and which he dedi- 
cated to Athene, which when filled with oil burned 
exactly a year without going out. 

It may be said broadly of the Grecian people in their 
employment of the three grand orders of architecture 
that the first two — namely, the Doric and Ionic — 
more closely harmonized with the dignity and nobility 
of their national character. In fact, Greece arrived at 
the pinnacle of her civilization and brought her philos- 
ophy of human existence not only in theory, but in 
practice, to its highest ideals before the Corinthian 
order of architecture appeared to claim a share in her 



60 SOME OLD MASTERS 

artistic reputation. The stately solidity of the Doric 
and the graceful purity of the Ionic lent the perfection 
of architectural framework to the mental strength and 
loftiness of ideal of the Hellenic people. They seemed 
to accord with the philosophy that was originally 
preached from under the shadow of their pediments and 
entablatures. We can almost see the doubting and 
mystified Theon stepping from the Doric portico where 
Zeno held forth, to compare that philosopher's stoical 
dogmas with the doctrines of Prudence preached in the 
Ionic-encompassed garden of Epicurus, by a philos- 
opher ever destined to be misconstrued and wrongfully 
interpreted. 

"All learning is useful," taught Epicurus ; "all the 
sciences are curious ; all the arts are beautiful ; but 
more useful, more curious and more beautiful is the 
perfect knowledge and perfect government of ourselves. 
Though a man should read the heavens, unravel their 
laws and their revolutions; though he should dive into 
the mysteries of matter, and expound the phenomena 
of the earth and air; though he should be conversant 
with all the writings and sayings and actions of the 
dead ; though he should hold the pencil of Parrhasius, 
the chisel of Polycletas or the lyre of Pindar ; though 
he should be one or all of these things, yet not know the 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 61 

secret springs of his own mind, the foundation of his 
opinions, the motives of his actions ; if he hold not the 
rein over his passions ; if he have not cleared the 
mist of all prejudice from his understanding; if he 
have not rubbed off all intolerance from his judgments ; 
if he know not to weigh his own actions and the actions 
of others in the balance of justice, that man hath not 
knowledge, nor, though he be a man of science, a man 
of learning or an artist, he is not a sage. He must sit 
down patient at the feet of Philosophy. With all his 
learning he hath yet to learn, and perhaps a harder task, 
he hath to unlearn." 

The Corinthian order, on the other hand, notwith- 
standing all its charm, beauty and variety, seemed to 
lack that steadfastness of character which bound so 
firmly the other tv r o orders to the hearts of the Grecian 
people, and was never admitted into their fullest trust 
and confidence. Indeed, it is generally conceded that 
the Corinthian model grew in favor as the architectural 
art of Greece declined ; and only when Greece, losing 
her autonomy, besan to lose her ambition and intellec- 
tual greatness and independence. It reached its fullest 
vogue with the later or Greco-Roman architects, who 
sacrificed much of purity in art for lavish and sightly 
display. With the Greeks the Corinthian was sparingly 



62 



SOME OLD MASTERS 



employed, and generally called upon for their smaller 
and less important buildings; on the other hand, with 
the Romans, enriched by additional features and orna- 
mentation of their own, it became the favorite order, 
not alone for portico and temple, but for public and 
private buildings of every nature. 






OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 



63 



CHAPTER IV. 



Early Grecian Architects. 




X the year 548 b.c. the great temple to Apollo 
at Delphi, the work of the legendary architects 
Agamedes and Trophonius, was destroyed by 
■fire. Of the four temples to the same deity that had 
been reared upon the same site, this was the first in 
which marble was employed as a building material. 
Naturally the question will present itself, how could 
a temple built of marble be destroyed by fire ? The 
answer is, that while the main walls of the cell and the 
columns, entablatures, pediments and other exposed 
parts of the early Greek temples were built of marble,- 
stone or sun-dried bricks, the roofs were generally of 
wood, and were heavily timbered, sometimes calling for 
great strength to support marble tiles. Much of the 
interior building material was also of wood, as well as 
the statuary with which the earlier temples were lav- 
ished and enriched. Thus if fire was started within 
the building, either by accident or, as not infrequently 



64 SOME OLD MASTERS 

happened, by the hand of an incendiary, there was suffi- 
cient combustible material for it to feed upon and to 
heat the entire structure, reducing the otherwise endur- 
ing marble to crumbling lime. 

The temple of Apollo having been thus destroyed, 
the much revered and highly respected Oracle was left 
without shelter and a place of business. This state of 
things of course could not long be allowed to continue, 
and the Amphictyons, a legislative body, having under 
its special care the Delphic temple, at once came to the 
front and ordered a new temple built at a cost of about 
$300,000. One-fourth of this sum was to be paid by 
the Delphians and the remaining three-fourths were 
to be contributed by the other cities of Greece and those 
nations which were in the habit of consulting the Oracle 
— a very proper distribution of the expense, considering 
how extensive and widespread was the renown and ap- 
preciation of the priestess. Amasis, King of Egypt, 
volunteered a thousand talents of alumina, thus showing 
what his feelings were in the matter, and the Alcnnv- 
onida?, one of the oldest and most aristocratic families 
of Athens, undertook the contract, it is hinted, mainly 
for political reasons. This may be true, as they were 
much involved in local politics, especially with the ban- 
ishment of Pisistratus, the tyrant, and they may have 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 65 

seen an opportunity in the rebuilding of this temple to 
make themselves very popular. They certainly went 
about it in the right way to achieve such a result, and 
did actually gain much influence by their generosity 
and the broadminded manner in which they disregarded 
the strict terms of the contract to do handsomer and 
better work than it called for. One particular illustra- 
tion of their liberality has attracted the attention of the 
historian: it was the building of the temple in Parian 
marble, instead of Porine stone. While the Alcmseoni- 
dse were prosecuting the work in this generous spirit, 
they did not neglect their fallen enemies, the Pisistra- 
tidse, and threw out occasional innuendoes to the effect 
that the Pisistratida* could tell more about the origin 
of the fire that destroyed the late temple than they evi- 
dently cared to, thereby intimating a crime as against 
their rivals that it might have been difficult to have 
proved. They even won the Oracle to their side by 
similar simple and ingenuous methods, with the result 
that ever afterward the Oracle did not hesitate to speak 
a kind word for the Alcmaeonida 1 and favor their native 
city, Athens. 

The architect of this new temple was Spintharus, a 
Corinthian. As nothing further seems to be known of 
him, we have been somewhat particular to mention the 



66 SOME OLD MASTERS 

importance of this work, to show that Spintharus was 
an artist who stood very high in his profession at the 
time. But as the temple was one of the longest in 
process of construction, taking about seventy-two years 
to complete, it is not likely that Spintharus lived to 
enjoy the full fruition of his work. 

It may be of interest to add that no structure of its 
kind throughout all Greece was made the depository of 
richer or more extensive treasure than this temple to 
Apollo at Delphi, a fact not to be marvelled at if we 
do not lose sight of the Oracle. We have already seen 
how it excited the cupidity of the brothers Agamedes 
and Trophonius. What they appropriated to themselves 
from the rich vaults of its predecessor was, however, 
comparatively insignificant to the wholesale robberies 
that went on from time to time of the fifth temple de- 
signed by Spintharus. Herodotus says that the wealth 
of Delphi was better known to the Persian Xerxes than 
were the contents of his own palace, and that after 
forcing the pass of Thermopylae he detached a portion 
of his army to capture Delphi. It failed to do so, only 
through the interposition of the Oracle or some other 
deity. Many years afterward the Phocians plundered 
the temple of what might be represented by $10,600,000 
of our money. Still later the Gauls also made a rich 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. G7 

haul, which the Romans afterward found in their city of 
Tolosa unexpended, probably because there was so much 
of it ; and J^ero is said to have taken from it five hundred 
bronze statues at one time. 

But these robberies fade into insignificance when the 
insult heaped upon the Delphians and their Oracle by 
Constantine the Great is recalled. This Roman vandal 
not only removed the sacred Tripod and Brazen Column 
which supported it, but degenerated their use to the 
adornment of the hippodrome of the new city he built 
on the Bosphorus. The Brazen Column may still be 
seen in Constantinople, but the sacred Tripod has dis- 
appeared forever. There is a little story connected with 
a first disappearance of the Tripod that may be worth 
the telling. It was lost at sea, but afterward recovered 
by some fishermen. When Pythia was asked to decide 
to whom it should be given, her answer was that it 
should be bestowed upon the wisest man in Greece. 
Accordingly it was sent to Thales of Miletos. He, how- 
ever, was too modest to retain it, and passed it over to 
Bias as a wiser man ; Bias was also embarrassed by the 
selection, and presented it to another of the Grecian 
sages ; he to still another, and so on, until it had made 
the circuit of pretty much every person in Greece with 
any claim at all to superior wisdom. Finally, however, 



68 SOME OLD MASTEKS 

it came back once more to Thales, who successfully 
ended its itinerary by dedicating it to the Delphic 
Apollo. 

One of the earliest of the great temples to be erected 
in the Ionic order was that begun in the Ionian city of 
Ephesus in Asiatic Greece by Ctesiphon, a Cretan 
architect born in Cnossus, and his son, Metagenes. This 
temple was erected to the glory of the many-breasted 
and mummy-like appearing Artemis, a goddess peculiar 
to the Ephesians, whom the Greek colonists there doubt- 
less inherited from the Asiatic races that preceded them 
in their Ionian settlement. There was nothing of the 
graceful, virgin-like characteristics of Apollo's sister, 
the Arcadian Artemis, in this Ephesian goddess, but the 
Ionian Greeks were quite partial to her, attended her 
with eunuch priests, and built in her honor this temple, 
so grand and magnificent that it was regarded as one 
of the seven wonders of the world. 

Before alluding to some of the interesting facts that 
have been preserved concerning the early history of this 
great temple it may not be out of place to touch upon 
a custom which prevailed in Ephesus in respect to the 
employment of architects, which Vitruvius relates. He 
says : "In the magnificent and spacious Grecian city of 
Ephesus an ancient law was made by the ancestors of 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 69 

the inhabitants, hard in its nature, but nevertheless 
equitable. When an architect was entrusted with the 
execution of a public work, an estimate thereof being 
lodged in the hands of a magistrate, his property was 
held as security until the work was finished. If, when 
finished, the expense did not exceed the estimate, he was 
complimented with decrees and honors. So when the 
excess did not amount to more than a fourth part of the 
original estimate, it was defrayed by the public, and no 
punishment was inflicted. But when more than one- 
fourth the estimate was exceeded, he was required to 
pay the excess out of his own pocket." 

The honest Vitruvius almost sighs as he adds : "Would 
to God that such a law existed among the Roman people, 
not only in respect to their public, but also of their pri- 
vate buildings, for then the unskilful could not commit 
their depredations with impunity, and those who were 
most skilful in the intricacies of the art would follow the 
profession ! Proprietors would not be led into an ex- 
travagant expenditure, so as to cause ruin; architects 
themselves, from the dread of punishment, would be 
more careful in their calculations, and the proprietor 
would complete his building for that sum or a little 
more, which he could afford to expend. Those who can 
conveniently expend a given sum on any work with the 



TO SOME OLD MASTERS 

pleasing expectation of seeing it completed would cheer- 
fully add one-fourth more; but when they find them- 
selves burdened with the addition of half or even more 
than half of the expense originally contemplated, losing 
their spirits and sacrificing what has already been laid 
out, they incline to desist from its completion." 

There are, perhaps, some people even at the present 
time who can be found to echo these sentiments of Vitru- 
vius, and exclaim : "Would to God that such a law existed 
among the American people, especially in Xew York 
and Chicago ! 

Theodoras of Samos, it will be remembered, laid the 
foundation of the temple to Artemis of Ephesus in the 
year 600 b.c. To guard against the destruction of the 
temple by earthquakes, a marshy site was chosen, and 
Theodoras insured a firm foundation, by using charcoal, 
which was rammed down solidly, and then covered with 
fleeces of wool. Ctesiphon and his son did not, how- 
ever, begin the superstructure until about forty years 
later. 

The dimensions of the building were very extensive, 
and although the architecture was full of grandeur, 
grace and beauty were not sacrificed. The length was 
four hundred and twenty-five feet ; the width two hun- 
dred and twenty feet. One hundred and twenty-seven 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 71 

Parian marble columns, each sixty feet in height, sur- 
rounded the cell in double rows, sixteen appearing in the 
front and rear fagades, and forty each on the sides. He- 
rodotus states that most of these columns were presented 
by the rich Croesus, and some by other kings. The cell, 
according to some authorities, was devoid of a roof, but 
Mr. Wood, in his "Discoveries at Ephesus," indicates 
otherwise. The whole edifice, both exteriorly and in- 
teriorly, presented great richness and elaboration of 
carving. The shafts of the columns in front of the 
building were carved in relief, in three broad bands, to 
nearly half their height, and those in the rear, in one 
band, to about one-quarter of their height. The frieze 
and pediments were also worked out by the chisel of the 
sculptor in designs of great and imposing beauty. 

Many of the stones used in the building were very 
massive. An idea of how huge some of these blocks were 
may be gathered from the fact that the architrave 
alone contained pieces of marble thirty feet long, and 
that Ctesiphon and Metagenes were forced to invent 
special machinery and contrivances to convey the stones 
for the columns to the building from the quarry eight 
miles distant. Vitruvius explains these contrivances as 
follows : "He [Ctesiphon] made a frame of four pieces 
of timber, two of which were equal in length to the 



72 



SOME OLD MASTEKS 



shafts of the columns, and were held together by the two 
transverse pieces. In each end of the shaft he inserted 
iron pivots, whose ends were dovetailed thereinto, and 
run with lead. The pivots worked in gudgeons fastened 
to the timber frame, whereto were attached oaken shafts. 
The pivots having a free revolution in the gudgeons, 
when the oxen were attached and drew the frame, the 
shafts rolled round, and might have been conveyed to 
any distance. The shafts having been thus transported, 
the entablatures were to be removed, when Metagenes, 
the son of Ctesiphon, applied the principle upon which 
the shafts had been conveyed to the removal of those 
also. He constructed wheels about twelve feet in diam- 
eter, and fixed the ends of the blocks of stone whereof the 
entablature was composed into them; pivots and gud- 
geons were then prepared to receive them in the manner 
just described, so that when the oxen drew the machine 
the pivots, turning in the gudgeons, caused the wheels 
to revolve, and thus the blocks, being enclosed like axles 
in the wheels, were brought to the work without delay. 
An example of this species of machine may be seen in 
the rolling stone used for smoothing the walks in 
palaestrae. But the method would not have been prac- 
ticable for any considerable distance. . From the quar- 
ries to the temple is a length of not more than eight 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 73 

thousand feet, and the interval is a plain without any 
declivity. Within our own time, when the base of the 
colossal statue of Apollo in the temple of that god was 
decayed through age, to prevent the fall and destruction 
of it, a contract for a base from the same quarry was 
made with Pseonius. It was twelve feet long, eight feet 
wide, and six feet high. Pa?onius, driven to an expedi- 
ent, did not use the same as ]\Ietagenes did, but con- 
structed a machine for the purpose by a different appli- 
cation of the same principle. He made two wheels 
about fifteen feet in diameter, and fitted the ends of the 
stone into these wheels. To connect the two wheels he 
framed into them, round their circumference, small 
pieces of two inches square, not more than one foot 
apart, each extending from one wheel to the other, and 
thus enclosing the stone. Round these bars a rope was 
coiled, to which the traces of the oxen were made fast, 
and as it was drawn out the stone rolled by means of the 
wheels ; but the machine, by its constant swerving from 
a direct, straightforward path, stood in need of constant 
rectification, so that Pseonius was at last without money 
for the completion of his contract." The uninitiated 
who have speculated as to how the ancients succeeded in 
moving and transporting considerable distances such 
huge blocks of stone, without the assistance of our mod- 



74 SOME OLD MASTERS 

ern machinery and contrivances, are given in this quo- 
tation from Vitruvius some hint as to the ingenuity and 
inventive ability of the early architects and builders. 

The temple, however, was slow in building, and Ctesi- 
phon and Metagenes, after writing a book on their great 
architectural work, passed away in due course of time. 
Their places were filled by other architects, of whom 
there is no record, but Demetrius, a priest of Diana, to- 
gether with Daphnis and Peonius, Ephenian architects, 
finally completed the work some two hundred and 
twenty years after it was begun by Ctesiphon and his 
son. In the course of that long interval, Scopas, an 
architectural sculptor of Paros, of whom there will be 
more to relate as we go on, contributed one column, 
which was regarded as so beautiful that it was accepted 
as a model for those that followed. 

Together with its architectural glories, the interior 
was made a depository for many of the finest works of 
the great artists of antiquity, and Scopas is said to have 
introduced Caryatides here. This is doubted, but he 
certainly furnished a very grand statue of Hecate ; and 
Praxiteles, with his almost equally gifted son, adorned 
the shrine. 

Tradition relates that upon the very night that the 
great Alexander was born, the'Ephesian temple was 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 75 

destroyed by fire, through the rapacious greed for 
notoriety of one Herostratus. This antique fire-bug, 
when put to the torture for his crime, confessed that his 
only object was to gain immortality for his name, an 
ambition which he succeeded in accomplishing through 
the stupidity of the states-general of Asiatic Greece. 
They decreed that the name of Herostratus should never 
be mentioned, and of course it always was, as all the 
contemporary historians felt impelled to record the fact 
that a man by the name of Herostratus was not to be 
mentioned, and to give the reasons therefor, and much 
more about Herostratus which, had there been no 
decree, might have been left unsaid. The result was and 
has been that a crank of antiquity has lived by name 
for twenty-five hundred years, and is quite, likely to live 
for as many more. 

When Alexander the Great reached maturity, doubt- 
less feeling the depression consequent upon having his 
advent into the world which he was destined to domi- 
nate, associated with the destruction of so magnificent a 
temple to the Asiatic Diana, offered, it is said, to pay the 
cost of its restoration, provided — there is frequently a 
proviso coupled with these liberal offers — provided his 
name should be inscribed on the new edifice. While the 
Ephesians were made glad by the offer, they did not 



76 SOME OLD MASTERS 

readily fall in with the proviso. The cleverness of their 
diplomatic reply, however, appealed to the susceptible 
side of Alexander's human nature, and effected a com- 
promise. They told the Macedonian that "it was not 
right for a god to make offerings to gods." 

The architect for the new temple was the great favor- 
ite of Alexander and his fellow-countryman, Dinocrates, 
who it is said rebuilt the edifice on even a more extrav- 
agant scale than was the first. Much of the marble and 
sculpturing of the old temple entered into the new, and 
the painters, statuaries and sculptors of the time again 
lavished upon it their best art. The walls were embel- 
lished from time to time by Parrhasius and Apelles ; and 
Timarete, the first female artist of note of whom there 
is any record, contributed a picture of the honored Arte- 
mis. It is related that the folding doors or gates of this 
new temple were made of cypress that had been allowed 
to season for four generations, and that when the pieces 
of cypress wood were glued together the glue was allowed 
to remain for four years to harden. Mutianus, a Roman 
architect, states that when he found them, which was 
four hundred years afterward, they were as fresh and 
beautiful as when new. 

Some remains of the splendor of this pagan temple 
are still doing architectural duty. The great dome of 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 77 

the beautiful Byzantine church of Santa Sophia in Con- 
stantinople, now a Turkish mosque, is supported by 
columns of green jasper, brought from the Ephesian 
temple by the Roman Emperor Justinian, and two of 
the pillars in the cathedral at Pisa are also from the 
same source. 

There is some confusion as to the works of art and 
decorations associated respectively with the two temples 
just described which it would be vain to attempt to 
clear up, believing that it matters but little, inasmuch 
as it is not likely that Ilerostratus could have destroyed 
completely the first temple, and that the services of 
Dinocrates were engaged more in the line of making 
good the damage done than in erecting an entirely new 
edifice. The upper colonnades of Corinthian columns, 
however, which Mr. Wood shows as appearing in the 
interior of the temple, are clearly the work of Dinoc- 
rates. 

Demetrius, the priest of Diana, and his associates, 
Peonius and Daphnis, the three architects who com- 
pleted the first Artemesian temple, having flourished 
over two hundred years after the foundation of that 
structure was laid, are not, of course, to be classed among 
the earlier of the Grecian architects, and, properly, 
should not be treated under this heading ; but as they are 



78 



SOME OLD MASTERS 



all grouped together in the erection of another great 
Asiatic-Greek temple, and are not further met with, it 
may be just as well to add what there is in respect to 
them at this time. 

The temple referred to was that dedicated to Apollo 
in the Ionian city of Miletus, not far distant from the 
scene of the joint labors of these architects at Ephesus. 
Its order was also Ionic, and although not as large as 
that to Artemis, it could have been very little, if any, 
inferior to it in columnar effect and general impressive 
beauty, if not grandeur. It was three hundred and two 
feet in length by one hundred and sixty-four feet in 
width, and, like the temple at Ephesus, was surrounded 
by double rows of columns, each column, however, being 
sixty-three feet in height. Indeed, Strabo, the cele- 
brated Roman traveller and geographer, who visited the 
ruins of the temple during the first century before the 
Christian era, testifies that "it is the greatest of all 
temples," and adds that it remained without a roof "in 
consequence of its bigness" ; but this allusion to its roof- 
less condition is probably due to the fact that the build- 
ing was never wholly completed. Pausanias also gives 
it high praise, and speaks of it as one of the wonders of 
Ionia, and Vitruvius numbers it "as one of the four 
temples which had raised their architects to the summit 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 70 

of renown"* — a renown, it would seem, that has been 
very much begrudged them, as the literature of their 
time furnishes practically no data in regard to them 
personally, and what estimate can be formed of them is 
wholly based upon the importance of their works. 

Peonius, we are told, was an Ephesian, but as to even 
the nativity of the other two architects we are in the 
dark, although Daphnis is supposed to have been a Mile- 
tian. There is also some little uncertainty as to the 
exact date when they exercised their profession, but it 
is probably safe to say that it was sometime within the 
first half of the fourth century before Christ. 

Two columns of the great temple to Apollo have stood 
proudly against the attacks of time, and although scarred 
by their long battles, are yet evidencing the glories of a 
structure of which they were once but an insignificant 
part. 

In the year 555 B.C. there lived four architects, to 
whose skill was entrusted the building of a temple that 
should be in all respects worthy to stand for the respect 
due the dignity, power and extreme longevity of the 
great Olympian Zeus — the king-god of the Greeks. 

*The other three temples which VUruvius praised thus highly 
were those to Diana at Ephesus, Jupiter Olympus at Athens, and 
Ceres at Eleusis. 



80 SOME OLD MASTERS 

The foundation for this shrine was laid in the time 
of Pisistratus, a tyrant of Athens, who contributed sev- 
eral architectural works to that city, but whose several 
banishments greatly interrupted their building. This 
was particularly the case with the great temple to Zeus. 
However, it was sufficiently advanced for Pisistratus to 
dedicate it before he fell from power. It has been stated 
that it was due to the genuine dislike which the Athe- 
nians felt for Pisistratus and his sons, who succeeded 
him, that four hundred years were allowed to flow by 
before the temple was finished. This is hardly just to a 
ruler of great loyalty to his native city, and of unques- 
tioned integrity in the discharge of his public duties. 
It is more probable that the delay was due to the ani- 
mosity of the rival Athenian family of Alcma?onida\ 
who, piqued by jealousy, fanned a flame of opposition 
to the works of Pisistratus that continued for several 
centuries. 

Antistates, Antimachides, Calleschros and Porinus 
were the four architects engaged by Pisistratus, who. 
like their professional brothers employed on the temples 
of Diana, Apollo and Ceres, were, according to Vitru- 
vius, entitled to immortality for the grandeur of their 
works, but about whom there is no other information 
to be o;iven. 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 81 

This temple to Jupiter was not built upon the Acrop- 
olis at Athens, like that to the patron goddess of the city, 
Minerva, but upon a raised peribolos within the city 
below, and on the site of an earlier temple to the same 
god, erected in the time of Deucalion, but which had 
perished from the ravages of ages. 

It was like most of the early Doric temples, of perip- 
teral construction, or surrounded by columns on all four 
sides. Aristotle, who saw it before it was finished, was 
so much impressed by its size that he compared it to the 
Pyramids ; and one of his scholars remarked that 
"though unfinished, it called forth astonishment, and 
when finished would be unexcelled." 

Perseus, king of Macedonia, and Antiochus Epiph- 
anes of Syria (176-164 b.c.) finally finished the cell 
and placed the Corinthian columns of the portico, em- 
ploying for the purpose a Roman architect of great skill 
by the name of Cossutius. It was then, probably, that 
Livy made the remark "that among so many temples this 
is the only one worthy of a god." 

Sylla, however, when he laid siege to Athens, some 
forty years later, robbed the temple most unmercifully, 
carrying away with him many of the columns to Rome. 
But his work of destruction was more than compensated 
for by his successor, Hadrian, two hundred years still 



82 SOME OLD MASTERS 

later, under the immediate direction of the celebrated 
Roman architect, Luigi Cannia. Hadrian, in his love 
of great architectural effects, was inspired to beautify 
the peribolos with a peristyle one hundred rods in 
length, and his architect contributed a new section to 
the temple itself, and added three grand vestibules. 

The sacred enclosure, after Hadrian had finished it, 
which had a circumference of about twenty-three hun- 
dred feet, was ornamented by statues, contributed in 
great numbers by different cities. The length of the tem- 
ple at this time, according to Stuart, was, upon the upper 
step, three hundred and fifty-four feet, and its breadth 
one hundred and seventy-one feet. The columns, which 
surrounded the cell, now all Corinthian, numbered one 
hundred and twenty-four, all of Pentelican marble, of 
which there are sixteen still standing. In the pronaos, 
or inner portico, Hadrian caused to be placed four 
statues of himself, two in Thracian and two in Egyptian 
marble, which were, perhaps, three more than a moder- 
ately modest man might have felt necessary. 

Another gorgeous temple to the great Jupiter was be- 
gun about five years later than that at Athens by the 
architect Libon, an Eleian, in Olympia, which Lysias 
speaks of as '"the fairest spot in Greece." In Olympia 
the spiritual and physical natures of the Grecian people 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 83 

may be said to have combined in the perfection of de- 
velopment. Here the glories of the body, the capabili- 
ties of the finest muscular strength and athletic action, 
■were exhibited in gymnasium and stadion, and here the 
religious spirit of the people arose to the fullest inten- 
sity, and as though doubly inspired by the action and 
strength of the perfect body, found expression in temple 
and sanctuary. 

So great was the reward, so enthusiastic the reception 
accorded the champions in the athletic games of Olym- 
pia, that they call forth a protest from the sensitive 
Vitruvius, who seems to feel that the honors conferred 
upon them should have been reserved for the literary 
lights of the time. "The ancestors of the Greeks," he 
complains, "held the celebrated wrestlers who were vic- 
tors in the Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian and Xemean 
games in such esteem that, decorated with the palm and 
crown, they were not only publicly thanked, but were 
also, in their triumphant return to their respective 
homes, borne to their cities and countries in four-horse 
chariots, and were allowed pensions for life from the 
public revenue. When I consider these circumstances, I 
cannot help thinking it strange that similar honors, or 
even greater, are not decreed to those authors who are 
of lasting service to mankind. Such certainlv ouc;ht to 



84 SOME OLD MASTERS 

be the case; for the wrestler, by training, merely 
hardens his own body for the conflict ; a writer, how- 
ever, not only cultivates his own mind, but affords every 
one else the same opportunity, by laying down precepts 
for acquiring knowledge and exciting the talents of his 
reader." 

So attractive was this spot on the banks of the Alpheus 
in Ellis, in natural charm, as well as in the purposes for 
which it was visited, that it is here, as nowhere else in 
Greece, with the possible exception of the Acropolis at 
Athens, the Grecian architects lavished their best skill 
and best illustrated their appreciation of the fact, that 
the effect of fine buildings is greatly augmented by 
grouping them gracefully together in one place, produc- 
ing, as it were, an architectural picture. "Many ob- 
jects," says Pausanias, "may a man see in Greece, and 
many things may he hear that are worthy of admira- 
tion, but above them all the doings at Eleusis and the 
sights at Olympia have somewhat in them of a soul 
divine." 

The worship of Zeus was an old worship in Olympia, 
so that when Libon was entrusted with authority to erect 
a new temple to that deity, out of the spoils taken in 
subjugating the Pisans and other neighboring cities 
which had revolted from the Eleans, he gave free reign 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 85 

to his art, and produced a Doric temple which rivalled 
that in Athens, though not as large. 

Pausanias informs us that the Olympian temple was 
two hundred and thirty feet long, ninety-five feet wide 
and sixty-eight feet high ; that it was surrounded by 
marble columns and covered with marble cut in the form 
of tiles. The front and rear pediments were adorned 
with sculpture, as well as the metopes of the frieze. The 
interior was of two orders of columns supporting lofty 
galleries, through which there was a passage to the 
throne of Jove "glittering with gold and gems." 

It was this temple of Libon's that became, soon after 
its completion, the casket which held the chef d'ceuvrc 
of Phidias, the colossal statue of Jupiter carved in ivory 
and gold, of which Quintilian observes that it added a 
new religious feeling to Greece. The story is well 
known how Phidias, being asked by his nephew Panse- 
nus, a painter, who assisted him in the decoration of the 
temple, how he could have conceived that air of divinity 
which he had expressed in the face of this noble statue, 
replied that he had copied it from Homer's description 
of the god. Jupiter was presented naked to his waist, 
but draped from his girdle down. The significance of 
this was that the great Jove, knowing himself to be of 
heavenly origin, thought it best to conceal himself in 



86 SOME OLD MASTERS 

part only from man. He was also given a beard for the 
reason that the Greeks, clinging to the Oriental notion, 
believed that beards carried with them an air of majesty ; 
an idea, by the way, which was not shared in by the 
Romans, who spoke with derision of their bearded fore- 
fathers, and permitted the wearing of beards only to 
those who were in disgrace, and to poor philosophers, 
who probably, like our poor modern poets, found a visit 
to the barber's an unnecessary and expensive luxury. 

Rome during these early times, and before she had 
awakened to the cultivation of the arts at home, was 
prone to borrow from Greece the talent of which she 
was in need. It was about this time that we find the 
first record of such a call made by Rome upon her east- 
ern neighbor for architects. The demand was answered 
by the two architectural sculptors Damophilus and 
Gorgasus, who were imported by the Dictator Posthu- 
mius to erect two temples in Rome, one to Castor and 
Pollux or, as some authorities assert, to Liber and Libera 
(Bacchus and Proserpine), which stood near the Forum 
and Temple of Vesta, and the other to Ceres, on the 
slope of the Aventine hill, near the Circus. These tem- 
ples were vowed by Posthumius, in his battle with the 
Latins, 496 B.C., and were dedicated by Viscellinus some 
years later. • 






OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 87 

Before closing this chapter, in which the attempt is 
made to gather together some of the earlier architects of 
Greece, it may be as well to include within it a number 
of such artists who though not rising to the highest 
fame, or who were not connected with the most elegant 
buildings of their time, nevertheless had the good for- 
tune to have their names preserved in history. 

Pliny tells a rather amusing and interesting account 
of such an architect by the name of Bupalus, who prob- 
ably flourished about the year 524 B.C. He is said to 
have come from a very old family of artists who exer- 
cised the art of the statuary from the beginning of the 
Olympiads ; but as Pliny simply speaks of him as an 
architect and artist, but does not mention any building 
attributed to his skill, he becomes a subject for notice 
only in connection with the Iambic poet Hipponax, 
whom he used his art to torment. Pliny relates that 
Bupalus and his brother Athenis amused themselves by 
making caricatures of the satirical poet. Hipponax was 
undersized, thin and ugly, and probably, like the modern 
poet Pope, suffered his physical defects to give him a 
cynical view of life. The caricatures of the playful 
Bupalus and Athenis naturally affected unpleasantly his 
amour pro pre, and he employed the weapon at his com- 
mand, his ironical pen, to strike back at his tormentors, 



OO SOME OLD MASTERS 

with the result that he gave them a good pen lashing in 
a satirical poem, in which he also chastised his Ionian 
brethren for what he considered their effeminate luxury. 
In the same poem, also, he did not spare his own parents, 
and it is said that he even had the temerity to ridicule 
the gods. 

There is, of course, always some one to start the story 
that a woman is at the source of all the infirmities that 
any particularly conspicuous man suffers from, and 
there are those who claim that Bupalus did not originate 
the trouble, but that it started through the fact that the 
architect had a very beautiful daughter of whom Hip- 
ponax was greatly enamored. Like the earlier Iambic 
poet Archilochus, who got into a similar scrape, the 
girl's father refused to permit his daughter to marry a 
poor little withered poet, with the result that the poet's 
life was ever after embittered. How very bitter Hip- 
ponax became, especially against the ladies, is illustrated 
by a remark which is attributed to him : ''There are," 
he said, "only two happy days in the life of a married 
man — that in which he receives his wife, and that in 
which he carries out her corpse." 

After his death Leonidas of Tarentum, in an elegant 
epigram, warned travellers not to pass too near his tomb, 
lest they rouse the sleeping wasp. The grave of Hip- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 89 

ponax, by the way, instead of being covered with ivy and 
roses, like that of a mild poet, was planted with thorns 
and thistles. 

Pausanias mentions several of these more obscure 
architects. Agnaptus was one, who built a porch in the 
Altis, or wall at Olympia, called afterward by the Eleans 
the "porch of Agnaptus," and Antiphilus, Potharus and 
^legacies were three other waifs on our sea of oblivion. 
They were responsible for the Treasury of the Cartha- 
ginians also at Olympia. Pyrrhus, with his two sons, 
Lacrates and Ilermon, built the Olympian Treasury of 
the Epidamnians. There were ten of these Treasuries, 
by the way, raised by different states, which were not 
only architecturally very beautiful, but which contained 
statues and other offerings of great value. 

Strabo mentions an architect and sculptor by the 
name of llermocreon, who designed a gigantic and beau- 
tiful altar at Parium on the Propontis in Asia Minor; 
and Eurycles, a Spartan architect, who built the baths 
at Corinth, and "adorned them with beautiful marbles," 
must not be overlooked, although he may have been of 
a much later date. 



90 SOME OLD MASTEKS 




CHAPTER V. 

THE ARCHITECTURAL EPOCH OF PERICLES. 

HE age of Pericles was so distinctively an era 
X I in the advancement of the arts, especially archi- 
tecture, not alone in the city where Athene shed 
her divine intelligence and tutelary influence with gen- 
erous favor, but throughout all the Hellenic states, and 
has left so many models and criterions for the architects 
of all time to follow, that a few words in reference to 
Pericles himself and the sculptor Phidias, into whose 
hands he entrusted the direction of his public buildings 
and the adornment of Athens, may be admissible, before 
we consider the architectural geniuses who sprung for- 
ward to meet the great requirements of the time. 

Pericles was a descendant of that noble and refined, 
if sometimes unfortunate, house of Alcma?onida?, which 
did so much for the Delphic temple of Apollo, and a son 
of Xanthippus, the victor of Mycale, and Agariste, niece 
of Cleisthenes, founder of the later Athenian constitu- 
tion. The date of his birth is not known, but that he 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 91 

early evinced a leaning toward the fine arts and philos- 
ophy is recorded. Under Pythocleides he studied music, 
under Damon political science, under Zeno philosophy ; 
but it remained for the erudite Anaxagoras to give the 
final burnish to his character and thought. He was 
therefore, both by birth and disposition, as well as cul- 
tivation, possessed of a mind singularly comprehensive 
in its grasp of the advantages which the arts of peace 
could contribute to the progress of his people, and natu- 
rally turned his attention to their exploitation and devel- 
opment, when he became dominant in the year 444 b.c. 
His rule of peace lasted but thirteen years, or until the 
breaking out of the Poloponnesian war, but was crowded 
with numerous artistic and architectural triumphs. 

That he may have gone a step too far in the encour- 
agement of pleasure and the peaceful virtues among a 
people of warlike antecedents and a future before them 
of foreordained defence and conquest, if not final de- 
feat, may be a subject for speculation ; but that he gave 
an impetus to literature and art, and by the fervent 
warmth of his patronage fostered the growth of genius 
in a way that had not been equalled before his time, and 
which has never been excelled since, is the principal rea- 
son, doubtless, for his immortality. 

His head was abnormally long, a defect which the 



92 SOME OLD MASTERS 

artists of his time invariably corrected with a helmet 
when painting or sculpturing his portrait, and the con- 
temporaneous comic poets and satirists as continually 
ridiculed in verse and jest. Speaking of his eloquence 
and powers of persuasion, Thucydides relates a pleasant 
story in respect to his dexterity in this regard. When 
Archidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians, asked Thu- 
cydides whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler, 
he replied : "When I have thrown him and given him 
a fair fall, he, by persisting that he had no fall, gets the 
better of me, and makes the bystanders, in spite of their 
own eyes, believe him." But in other respects his 
physique was well proportioned and his bearing noble 
and commanding. His manner was dignified and re- 
served, his eloquence strong, fearless and convincing, 
and his general appearance such as to inspire the people 
to compliment him with the name "Olympian Zeus," a 
character in which his portrait was also painted by his 
favorite, Phidias. 

An English writer well says that the age of Pericles 
was "the milky way of great men," for it was certainly 
clouded to whiteness Avith intellectual stars. The names 
associated with this era are not only among the most 
celebrated in all Grecian history, but among the most 
renowned that have sprung forward in the history of 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 93 

all the world. Poets, philosophers, dramatists, musi- 
cians, sculptors, painters, architects, not only arose 
in great numbers under his fostering encouragement, 
but to the highest eminence in their respective avoca- 
tions. In fact, it seems as though the human plant 
that had long been growing, strengthening and broaden- 
ing upon Hellenic soil had suddenly sprung into the 
fullest flower and enveloped itself in intellectual 
beauty. 

The Athens which we so frequently see pictured in 
all her restored architectural grace and grandeur, the 
Athens which from her Acropolis of chiselled white so 
proudly surveys the iEgean sea and surrounding plains, 
is the Athens of Pericles, noblest of all cities in the pur- 
suits of virtue, of beauty and contentment, and in the 
pure realization of that happiness which the practice 
of the arts alone can afford. 

The budding of Athenian architectural magnificence 
may be said to have begun under Themistocles and 
Cimon, the immediate predecessors of Pericles, but not 
to have ripened and flowered in its perfection until his 
advent into power. Then it was that the task of build- 
ing a city in every way worthy of the people who had 
proved their prowess before the Persian hosts in war, 
and who in peace could delight in the musical poems of 



'.' I SOME OLD MASTERS 

Homer, \v;is pushed to a speed v realization with enthu- 
siasm. 

Nothing in all the biography of Pericles lias contrib- 
uted SO greatly to the perpetuity of his fame as this 
attention which he gave to the development of the archi- 
tectural magnificence of Athens. "That which gave 

most pleasure and ornament to the city of Athens," says 
Plutarch, "and the greatest admiration and oxen aston- 
ishment to all strangers, and that which now is Greece's 
Only evidence that the power she boasts of and her 
ancient wealth are mt romance of idle stow, was his 

construction of the public and sacred buildings. The 

materials were stone, brass, LVOry, gold, ebony and 

cypress-wood; the artisans that wrought and fashioned 

them were smiths and carpenters, moulders, founders 
and braziers, stone-cut ters, dyers, goldsmiths, ivory - 

workers, painters, embroiderers, turners; those again 
that conveyed them to the town for use, merchants and 
mariners arid ship-masters by sea ; and by land, cart- 
wrights, cattle breeders, wagoners, rope-makers, tlax- 
workers, shoemakers and leather-dressers, road-makers, 
miners. And every trade in the same nature, as a cap- 
tain in an army has his particular company of soldiers 
under him, had its own hired company of journeymen 
and laborers belonging to it banded together as in array, 



OF GBEEK ARCHITECTUEE. 95 

to be, as it were, the instrument and body for the per- 
formance <>f the service Thus, to say all in a word, 
the occasions and services of these public works distrib- 
uted plenty through every age and condition." 

"Architecture," says Robert Adam, "in a particular 
manner depends upon the patronage of the great, as they 
alone are able to execute what the architect plans." This 
being bo, the architects of his time had in Pericles a 

patron in every way worthy their best efforts. Indeed, 
so ambitious was he to grace the city of his nativity with 
all the beauties of architecture that his enemies found 
here a pretext for censure, and complained that he spent 
too much of the public treasure for such a purpose. lie 
met the criticism, however, with the argument that those 
who pursued the arts of war should not be the only ones 
to receive support at the expense of the state, but that 
those who possessed the .-kill and industry of true artists 
and artisans were quite as much entitled to public en- 
couragement and support as the soldier. 

This answer for a time appeased the clamor of the 
opposition, which had been >d up again si what they 
would lead the people to believe was extravagance and 
wastefulness on the part of Pericles. Bu1 it soon broke 
out again. When finally it became no longer bearable, 
Pericles addressed his accusers and said: "If you think 



96 SOME OLD MASTERS 

that I have expended too Uracil let the money he charged 
to my account, not yours, only let the new edifices be in- 
scribed with my name and not tint! of the people of 
Athens/' It is to the credit of the Athenians that their 
pride was touched hy the words of their ruler and their 
cupidity restrained. They at once replied that Pericles 
might spend as much of their money as he pleased, and 
they even went further, and insisted that he should not 
spare the public treasury in the least. Like all great 
men, Pericles was assailed in a variety of ways. When 
his enemies did not accomplish their purpose in bringing 
him to public disgrace by one method of assault, they 
tried another. We have seen how they failed in one in- 
stance ; another was similar in accusing him, in com- 
plicity with Phidias, of appropriating to his own use the 
public treasure, donated to pay for the golden plate- on 
the chryselephantine statues of the latter's creation. 
But this charge also not proving successful, they at- 
tacked his religious character, strange as it may appear, 
when it is remembered how deeply he was interested in 
erecting temples of pagan worship. But he survived the 
slanders of his time and continued his aims and purposes 
in life, content, doubtless, that posterity should judge 
him aright, as did the majority of the people of his own 
time. His last words arc perhaps the best epitome of 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 97 

his life's work: "No Athenian ever put on black 
through me." 

Teleclides has put into verse the great surrender 
which the Athenian people appeared finally to make to 
Pericles of their rights in peaco and war : 

"The tribute of the cities, and, with them, the cities too, 

To do with them as he pleases, and undo ; 

To build up, if he likes, stone walls around a town ; 

And, again, if so he likes, to pull them down ; 

Their treaties and alliances, power, empire, peace and 

war. 
Their wealth and their success forevermore." 

As already stated, in no branch of the arts did the age 
of Pericles make a deeper and more lasting impression 
than in that of architecture. Although the Doric order 
was employed many hundred years before his time, and 
the Ionic scarcely less many, yet the finest types of each 
and the examples of these orders which stand for their 
most perfect and artistic development are to be found 
in the Acropolis at Athens in the time of Pericles, the 
Parthenon serving as the criterion of one and the Erech- 
theum as the model of the other. That these orders 
should have been brought to such perfection and en- 
dowed with their crowning dignity and grace, must 
alone prove without further argument, if need be, that 



98 SOME OLD MASTERS 

the architectural talent and artistic sense of the age was 
incomparable. 

The part which the great sculptor Phidias played in 
the art drama of his time has been already alluded to, 
but not sufficiently, perhaps, to exclude a further ref- 
erence to him. 

The comparison has often been made between Phidias 
and the talented revivalist of the fifteenth century, 
Michael Angelo, and a casual consideration of the two 
eminent artists would indicate that it was a proper one. 
They were both sculptors, both painters, both engravers 
(Phidias of gems), but they were not both architects, as 
is erroneously assumed. xVs to the respective degrees 
of talent which each manifested toward the branches 
of art which he professed, they also differed widely. In 
sculpture the school of Michael Angelo will not outlive 
that of Phidias, but in painting, especially in its appli- 
cation to mural decoration, the Greek must bow to the 
Italian. In architecture also Phidias possessed none 
of the technical knowledge and skill which in Michael 
Angelo enabled him to suspend the great dome of St. 
Peter's "as if in the air," and which was so important a 
factor in his long artistic career, manifested in other 
ways as well, and gaining for him perpetual applause. 
However, the two artists may be well compared, inas- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 99 

much that they both created epochs of their own ; and 
both excelled in exhibiting a noble understanding as to 
the high and exalted possibilities of art that has never 
been equalled. 

Phidias's comprehensive grasp of broad artistic ef- 
fects had as much to do, probably, with gaining for him 
the favor of Pericles as his technical skill. Quintilian 
calls him the "Sculptor of the gods." He realized the 
greatness of large things and could calculate their power 
m influencing the imagination and understanding. He 
was once invited, together with his contemporary artist, 
Alcamenes, to design a statue of Minerva, destined to be 
placed upon a high column. When both statues were 
finished and exhibited, that made by Alcamenes was at 
once preferred on account of its elegance of finish, while 
that by Phidias was rejected as being rough and crude. 
Phidias, however, insisted that each should be shown 
from the high pinnacle upon which it might ultimately 
be placed. When this was done all the elegant graces 
of the statue of Alcamenes were lost to sight, as well 
also the apparent roughness of that by Phidias, which 
now took on the perfect proportions he had foreseen. 
This story will serve to illustrate the breadth of his 
artistic discernment. 

Of all the artists of his time, Phidias was by far the 



J 



100 SOME OLD MASTERS 

best gifted to have placed in his hands, by Pericles, the 
supervision of the public buildings of Athens, and to 
have entrusted to his discretion and judgment the plan- 
ning, posing and arranging of the grand architectural 
mise en scene,, which his patron had determined should be 
set there. If Phidias did not draw the actual plans of a 
building or other structure, his judgment could indicate 
its order, its location and such other characteristics it 
should possess to harmonize with the features with which 
it was to be associated. He could group the majestic 
masonry of his time in grand display, could beautify it 
with his own chisel, and could form and mould the com- 
plete architectural picture. If he was not the architect 
of the Parthenon, he at least enhanced its effect with 
the magnificence of his sculpturings and designs in the 
metopes of the frieze and the timpanums of the pedi- 
ments, some of which are still to be seen among the 
''Elgin marbles" in the British Museum, of which 
Canova remarked they would alone compensate for a 
visit to England. It is not improbable, also, that he may 
have suggested the Caryatides of the Erechtheum, and 
proved to the Egyptians, from whom the architectural 
idea was borrowed, how far more beautifully and grace- 
fully such figures could be carved in Athens than on the 
banks of the ^Nlle. 



OF GKEEK ARCHITECTURE. 101 

There can be no doubt as to the value of statuary, 
which was the special province of Phidias, in enhancing 
the ensemble of Grecian architectural grouping, and 
particularly valuable was the colossal figure of Minerva 
Promachus in contributing to the grandiose effect of 
the Athenian Acropolis. This noble work of Phidias 
was seventy feet high and made entirely of bronze, said 
to have been taken from the Medes, who disembarked at 
Marathon. The colossal goddess stood exposed, and in a 
position where, in looking far away over the ^Egean 
sea, she might be an inspiration to the returning Athe- 
nian mariner, and where, in glancing from her lofty em- 
inence, "she seemed, by her attitude and her accoutre- 
ments, to promise protection to the city beneath her, and 
to bid defiance to her enemies." 

Another architectural statue, if it may be called such, 
was that of the same goddess, in gold and ivory, which 
dominated the interior of the Parthenon. This work of 
Phidias, second only in beauty and size to the chrysele- 
phantine statue of Jupiter at Olympia, is said to have 
cost $465,000. The figure of Minerva was forty feet 
in height, and was presented standing in a tunic which 
reached to her feet. A casque covered her head, her 
right hand held a spear, and her left a figure of Victory. 
The exquisite workmanship of the carving on the 



102 SOME OLD MASTERS 

buckler resting at the feet of the deity came near in- 
volving Pericles and Phidias in another web of trouble, 
for it was asserted that the sculptor had introduced his 
own portrait and that of his patron among the comba- 
tants of a battle between the Athenians and Amazons, 
there portrayed. The captious objection was set up that 
such a liberty was insulting to Athene. Phidias, as re- 
lated by some writers, was cast into prison for this act 
of impiety, and died there. Others claim, however, that 
this was not so, but that Phidias, before sentence could 
be passed, fled to Elis, where he at once entered upon 
the work of modelling the great statue of the Olympian 
Jupiter. 

In respect to both statues, he was implicated with 
Pericles, as accused by his enemies, with pilfering the 
gold donated for their construction. These various ac- 
cusations have led to considerable confusion in respect 
to much of his personal history and final end, and al- 
though it was proved by removing the gold plates and 
weighing them, that he was not guilty of the alleged 
crime, it is very probable that his death was as much due 
to disappointed hopes and mortification consequent upon 
the false charge as it was to any public executioner of 
the time. 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 103 




CHAPTER VI. 

THE ARCHITECTS OF THE AGE OF PERICLES. 

T is not the intention, in recalling some of 
the more conspicuous architects who flour- 
ished in the time of Pericles, to confine them 
to those only who were directly in his employ, but to 
group together all who became prominent factors in 
the architectural development of that age, both for 
some years before and after Pericles's reign of power. 
To have carried forward the many important works 
which the great leader instituted, and which were ad- 
vanced with a precision and rapidity remarkable for 
that or any other time, considering their size and im- 
portance, the skill and services of many architects were 
brought naturally into requisition. As a result we have 
the record of an unusually large number of such artists, 
and in respect to a few some little specific data relating 
to their lives. The architects, however, of many of the 
most important works are unknown. 

If we approach Athens, like the Attic mariner of old, 



104 SOME OLD MASTERS 

through the Piraeus, one of its sea gates, we are attracted 
at once to the beautiful architectural display which this 
seaport town, some five or six miles distant from the 
Grecian metropolis, presents. The entrance to the har- 
bor was ornamented with two lions, and the harbor- 
basin was fringed with magnificent colonnades and 
porticos, which disguised the warehouses and bazaars. 
Within the town were numerous temples, two theatres 
and other buildings of artistic effect and merit. 

The road to Athens lay between massive fortified 
walls having a width of fifteen feet at the top, and built 
to a height of sixty feet. They were known as the '"Long 
Walls," and they enclosed a space about the Piraeus, said 
by Thucydides to have been not less than one hundred 
and twenty-four stadia in circumference, or about fifteen 
mile-. 

It is only just to state that the walls which led from 
Athens to Piraeus, as well as those which connected it 
with the other sea gates of Munychia and Phalerus, were 
originally planned and partly executed under Themis- 
tocles and Cimon. Themistocles intended to construct 
these walls to a height of one hundred and twenty feet ; 
but Pericles deemed this entirely unnecessary, and cut 
the height in two, as we have seen. He also added a third 
wall between that running to the north of the Piraean 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 105 

fortifications and that reaching to the Phaleram. Soc- 
rates speaks of having heard Pericles mention this wall 
to the people. 

The architects for much of this massive mural work 
were ITippodamus and Callicrates, and because Pericles 
did not hurry them to the same extent that he hurried 
others engaged in perhaps less important, if more dec- 
orative, undertakings, Cratinns, the satirist, ridiculed 
the slowness of the work, while aiming a sly shaft of 
irony at Pericles's oratorical gifts : 

"Stones upon stones the orator has pil'd 
With swelling words, but words will build no walls." 

Hippodamus was one of the genuises of his day, and 
has been called the "Wren of his age." Perhaps it would 
be more fitting to speak of Sir Christopher Wren as the 
Hippodamus of his time, inasmuch as the architectural 
achievements of the Greek were on a much more mag- 
nificent scale than those of the Englishman. Among 
some of the conspicuous works credited to him was the 
grand Athenian Agora, or Forum, which was made up 
of a rich assemblage of colonnades, temples, altars and 
statues, all taking his name as the ITippodam?ea. But 
whether he is to be credited with being more especially 
a civil engineer than an architect may be inferred from 
his work at the Piraeus and in laving out entire cities. 



106 SOME OLD MASTERS 

He was called the "Excentric Architect" doubtless 
because he mingled with the practice of his profession a 
desire to be considered as thoroughly versed in all the 
physical sciences, a personal affectation which caused 
him to be ranked among the sophists. It is claimed 
that it was against Hippodamus that Aristophanes 
aimed much of his wit. 

Hippodamus was the son of Euryphon of Miletus, 
one of the most famous of the Greek physicians and 
among the first to have knowledge of the difference be- 
tween the veins and arteries, and the uses of each. As 
to his early education and advantages we are not in- 
formed, he being referred to by early writers only in a 
professional way. 

Besides his employment upon the "Long Walls," the 
Agora and other edifices, Pericles engaged his talents, 
as we have intimated, in laying out the port of Piraeus, 
which he did, with broad streets and avenues intersect- 
ing each other at right angles across the city. This 
plan of street construction he also introduced in other 
cities of Greece and her colonies with which he had to 
do, especially at Thurii on the site of the ancient 
Sybaris, which he visited with the Athenian colonists, 
and later at Rhodes. This last-mentioned city, which 
in the age of Pericles was one of the most beautiful, 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 107 

regular and prosperous of the times, was almost wholly 
the work of Hippodamus. 

Callicrates, who assisted Hippodamus with the "Long 
Walls," was also an associate of Ictinus, perhaps the 
greatest architect of his time, in the building of the 
Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis. The architect 
Callicrates should not be mistaken for the Lacedse- 
monian sculptor of the same name who achieved great 
celebrity for his skill in carving the most minute ob- 
jects, and of whom it is related that he made ants and 
other insects in ivory which were so very small that 
their limbs could not be distinguished by the naked eye. 
This seems all the more remarkable when it is remem- 
bered that the ancients had no magnifying glasses. 

A walk of five or six miles under the shadows of the 
tall walls of Hippodamus and Callicrates to view the 
greater architectural glories of the city of Athens in the 
time of Pericles will doubtless repay us. While this 
queen city of the ancient world is enrobed in many tri- 
umphs of the builder's art, we will probably pass them 
all by for the time being to examine more carefully the 
gems that stand forth from the Acropolis, glittering 
under the blue Grecian sky like white jewels in the 
proud city's coronet. 

This magnificent citadel, protected by Pelasgian walls 



108 SOME OLD MASTERS 

and dedicated to the pagan deity Minerva, could be 
entered but upon one side, the western, where the mas- 
sive gate or vestibule of the Propylaea occupied the cen- 
tre. Fragments of this great gate still give evidence 
to the modern traveller of its former stately splendor. 

"Here," says Bishop Wordsworth, "above all places 
at Athens, the mind of the traveller enjoys an exquisite 
pleasure. It seems as if this portal had been spared in 
order that our imagination might send through it, as 
through a triumphal arch, all the glories of Athenian 
antiquity in visible parade. It was this particular point 
in the localities of Athens which was most admired by 
the Athenians themselves; nor is this surprising; let us 
conceive such a restitution of this fabric as its surviving 
fragments will suggest — let us imagine it restored to its 
pristine beauty — let it rise once more in the full dignity 
of its youthful nature — let all its architectural decora- 
tions be fresh and perfect — let their mouldings be again 
brilliant with their glowing tints of red and blue — let 
the coffers of its soffits be again spangled with stars, 
and the marble antse be fringed over as they were once 
with delicate embroidery of ivy-leaf . . . and then 
let the bronze valves of these five gates of the Propylaea 
be suddenly flung open and all the splendors of the in- 
terior of the Acropolis burst upon the view." 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 109 

If this imaginative restoration of the sublimities of 
the Propyhea is not sufficient to excite some interest in 
the building and the slave-born architect who was its 
creator, let the glowing words of Symonds be added, 
which refer not only to the grand vestibule itself, but to 
the Panathenaic processions which were wont to pass its 
gates. 

''Musing thus upon the staircase of the Propyhea we 
may say with truth that all our modern art is but as 
child's play to that of the Greeks. Very soul-subduing 
is the gloom of a cathedral like the Milanese Duomo 
when the incense rises in blue clouds athwart the bands 
of sunlight falling from the dome, and the crying of 
choirs upborne on the wings of organ music fills the 
whole vast space with a mystery of melody. Yet such 
ceremonial pomps as this are but as dreams and shapes 
of visions when compared with the clearly defined 
splendors of a Greek procession through marble peri- 
styles in open air beneath the sun and sky. That spec- 
tacle combined the harmonies of perfect human forms 
in movement with the divine shapes of statues, the radi- 
ance of carefully selected vestments with hues in- 
wrought upon pure marble. The rhythms and melodies 
of the Doric mood were sympathetic to the proportions 
of the Doric colonnades. The grove of pillars through 



110 SOME OLD MASTEKS 

which the pageant passed grew from the living rocks 
into shapes of beauty, fulfilling by the inbreathed spirit 
of man nature's blind yearning after absolute comple- 
tion. The sun itself, not thwarted by artificial gloom 
or tricked with alien colors of stained glass, was 
made to minister in all his strength to a pomp the 
pride of which was a display of form in manifold mag- 
nificence. The ritual of the Greeks was the ritual of 
a race at one with nature, glorying in its affiliation to 
the mighty mother of all life, and striving to add by 
human art the coping stone and final touch to her 
achievement." 

The Propylaea stretched in all about one hundred and 
seventy feet across the western side of the citadel, and 
was entirely built of Pentelic marble. In the centre was 
a portico sixty feet broad of six fluted Doric columns, 
each column thirty feet in height, and all supporting a 
noble pediment. From this portico projected on either 
side a wing, entered through three Ionic columns. Six 
Ionic columns assisted in supporting the roof of the 
vestibule. The marble beams of this roof were from 
seventeen to twenty-two feet in length and correspond- 
ingly solid. The ceiling was richly carved and orna- 
mented. Immediately in the rear of the Ionic columns 
and at the end facing the Acropolis stood the terminal 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. Ill 

wall, with its five bronze gates, the centre one, which 
was the largest, being sufficiently broad to allow the 
passage of a chariot or other such vehicle. Beyond this 
wall and its gates was the posticuni, adding eighteen 
feet to the depth of forty-three feet which the build- 
ing otherwise possessed. The temple of the "Wingless 
Victory," and the "Painted Chamber," containing the 
finest works of the painter Polygnotus, as they have 
been named, formed the wings, which presented un- 
broken Avails to the front, relieved only by the four 
Ionic columns that supported the graceful entablature 
and pediment of the temple of Xike Apteros on the 
right. 

As the building was begun in the year 437 B.C., and 
was entirely completed within a period of five years, and 
was one of the most imposing structures of its day, Pau- 
sanias is led to reflect that, "in felicity of execution and 
in boldness and originality of design, it rivalled the 
Parthenon." Lubke's comment on the structure is: 
"Thus in this building the idea of fortress-like defence, 
as well as festive welcome, was equally expressed. Espe- 
cially admirable, however, was the rich ceiling of the 
great three-naved court, both on account of the bold span 
of its beams and the magnificent decoration of the spaces 
between them (the coffers), which were brilliant with 



112 SOME OLD MASTERS 

gold and colors.* The Ionic form of the columns in the 
interior also corresponded with this festive, cheerful 
character; while the two rows of columns on the out- 
side, together with the rest of the exterior of the build- 
ing, exhibited the seriousness and dignity of the Doric 
style." 

Thus has much been quoted in description and eulogy 
of this noble piece of architecture ; would that as much 
might be quoted in respect to the talents and career of 
its gifted designer, but of him there is only the shadow 
of comment, from which it is possible to weave but the 
faintest fabric of certainty concerning his life. 

His name was Mnesicles, and we are told that he was 
a slave born in the household of Pericles. That he 
should have been chosen to create so important an 
architectural work speaks for the privilege which the 
humblest born might hope to attain in rising to posi- 
tions of trust and prominence in the days of that great 
leader. Mnesicles early manifested an aptitude for 
architecture, and was permitted by his illustrious patron 
and owner to exercise his talent in the erection of build- 
ings of inferior consequence before being entrusted with 
more ambitious works. The Propyla?a was not the only 

* The decoration referred to was the work of the distinguished 
painter Protogenes. 




THE FALL OF MNESICLES FROM THE PROPYL.EA. 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 113 

work of magnitude upon which he was engaged, nor was 
it the most beautiful, in the judgment of some critics, 
although the most important, for he was the architect as 
well of the graceful Doric temple of Theseus, which has 
always been regarded as one of the finest architectural 
conceptions the ancient city of Athens possessed. 

An incident in his life which awakened the affec- 
tionate interest of Pericles and the solicitude of the 
goddess Athene, whom he was serving so well, is told 
by Plutarch and other early biographers. It is in effect 
that while inspecting the almost completed work of the 
Propylaea he fell from the summit of the pediment and 
was most severely injured. He was taken at once to the 
house of Pericles, where he received the personal atten- 
tion of the great ruler. It was while he lay at death's 
door that it is said Minerva appeared to Pericles in a 
dream, and told him to administer to Mnesicles a medi- 
cine distilled from the wall-plant pellitory. This was 
done, and the life of the architect was spared. The only 
other fact associated with the life of Mnesicles which 
has been preserved to us is one mentioned by Pliny to 
the effect that the sculptor Stipax of Cyprus made a 
statue of the architect which became very celebrated in 
its time, and which yas called Splanchnoptes. It was 
given this name because it represented a person roasting 



114 SOME OLD MASTEKS 

the entrails of the victim at a sacrifice, at the same time 
blowing the fire with his breath. There is nothing sug- 
gestive of the architect in question or his profession, but 
it is supposed to have been a statue of Mnesicles, from 
the fact that Pliny speaks of the subject as having been 
a slave of Pericles, who was cured of the wounds received 
in a fall from the Propyhea by an herb which Minerva 
had suggested should be given as a medicine. It is un- 
fortunate that the statue has not survived to give us 
some idea of the features of at least one of the great 
architects of antiquity. Some recent discoveries on the 
Acropolis have, however, brought forth fragments which 
are supposed to have been parts of the base. 

If there is any one of the Greek architects of the time 
of Pericles who can be said to have secured for himself 
a degree of popular notoriety throughout subsequent 
ages it is the accomplished Ictinus, the chief architect 
of the Parthenon and the designer of at least two other 
conspicuously beautiful buildings of which we know — 
namely, the temple of Apollo Epicurus, near Phigalia 
in Arcadia, and the temple of Ceres and Proserpine at 
Eleusis. It is, no doubt, due, however, to his connec- 
tion with the Parthenon that his fame has so long en- 
dured. 

As already stated, Callicrates assisted in the building 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 115 

of the Parthenon, and Phidias contributed the designs 
for the relief carvings in the pediments and metopes, 
executing much of the work with his own hands. Al- 
though Vitruvius savs that "both Ictinus and Callic- 
rates exerted all their powers to make this temple 
worthy of the goddess who presided over the arts," it is 
not likely that Callicrates's share in the work was equal 
to that of Ictinus, but was confined more to the heavy 
masonry, and in offering to Ictinus such advice as he 
might seek in giving to the building the greatest sub- 
stantiality and permanency. 

The Parthenon, which, among the several master- 
pieces of the Acropolis, must be acknowledged the great- 
est, stood upon a rocky elevation in the citadel, which 
so far elevated the structure as to bring the pavement 
of the peristyle upon a level with the capitals of the 
columns of the eastern portico of the Propylaea. This 
was the same site which had been occupied formerly by 
an earlier temple to Minerva, known among the Athe- 
nians as the Hecatompedon on account of its propor- 
tions. 

The Parthenon of Ictinus is said to have cost one 
thousand talents, or what would be equal to about 
$1,100,000 of our money. It was begun the year 422 
B.C., and completed at the expiration of sixteen years. 



116 SOME OLD MASTERS 

It conformed to the usual shape of the Greek temples, 
being rectangular and peripteral. The length from east 
to west was two hundred and twenty-seven feet and 
seven inches, the width a little over one hundred and one 
feet. The Doric order was employed for the exterior, 
the columns which surrounded the cell on all sides being 
thirty-four feet in height, with a diameter of six feet at 
the base. There were forty-six of these columns, spring- 
ing directly from the stylobate or steps, all fluted with 
twenty channels, and each carrying its share of a very 
beautiful entablature. The gables or pediments at each 
end of the temple were of flat pitch. The total height of 
the building from the steps to the top of the gables was 
sixty-four feet. White marble from Mount Pentelicum, 
"wrought," as Mr. Kinnaird expresses it, "with the ex- 
quisite finish of a cameo," was the material employed for 
the entire structure, with the exception of the supporting 
timbers of the roof, which were wood covered with 
marble tiles. 

The interior, to quote Mr. Kinnaird again, "en- 
shrined the chryselephantine colossus with all its gor- 
geous adjuncts, and comprised sculptural decoration 
alone for one edifice exceeding in quantity that of all 
recent national monuments ; consisting of a range of 
eleven hundred feet of sculpture and containing, on cal- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 117 

dilation, upward of six hundred figures, a portion of 
which were colossal, enriched by painting and probably 
golden ornaments. Here has been really verified the 
prediction of Pericles that, when the edifices of rival 
states would be mouldering in oblivion, the splendor of 
his city would be still paramount and triumphant/' In 
respect to the richness of its interior treasures, very 
much the same idea is expressed by Bishop Wordsworth, 
who says, in the course of his description of the build- 
ing : "It would, therefore, be a very erroneous idea to 
regard this temple which we are describing merely as 
the best school of architecture in the world. It was also 
the noblest school of sculpture and the richest gallery of 
painting." 

The cleverness of the architects in insuring to the 
Parthenon, after its completion, the appearance of abso- 
lute harmony of proportion in all its outward lines, is 
one of their best claims to that celebrity which they have 
justly earned. As it goes so far toward illustrating their 
great professional skill, the reader may be interested in 
reading the language used by Professor Roger Smith of 
London in explaining the measures adopted by Ictinus 
and possibly Callicrates also, to correct the optical de- 
fects which the Parthenon might otherwise have pos- 
sessed when completed. 



118 SOME OLD MASTERS 

"The delicacy and subtlety of these [optical illusions] 
are extreme, but there can be no manner of doubt that 
they existed. The best known correction is the diminu- 
tion in diameter or taper, and the entasis or convex curve 
of the tapered outline of the shaft of the column. With- 
out the taper, which is perceptible enough in the order 
of this building, and much more marked in the order of 
earlier buildings, the columns would look top-heavy ; 
but the entasis is an additional optical correction to pre- 
vent their outline from appearing hollowed, which it 
would have done had there been no curve. The columns 
of the Parthenon have shafts that are over thirty-four 
feet high, and diminish from a diameter of 6.15 feet at 
the bottom to 4.81 feet at the top.. The outline between 
these points is convex, but so slightly so that the curve 
departs at the point of greatest curvature not more than 
three-quarters of an inch from the straight line joining 
the top and bottom. This is, however, just sufficient to 
correct the tendency to look hollow in the middle. 

"A second correction is intended to overcome the ap- 
parent tendency of a building to spread outward toward 
the top. This is met by inclining the columns slightly 
inward. So slight, however, is the inclination, that 
were the axes of two columns on opposite sides of the 
Parthenon continued upward till they met, the meeting 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 



119 



point would be 1952 yards, or, in other words, more 
than one mile from the ground. 

"Another optical correction is applied to the hori- 
zontal lines. In order to overcome a tendency which 
exists in all long lines to seem as though they drop in 
the middle, the lines of the architrave of the top step 
and of other horizontal features of the building are all 
slightly curved. The difference between the outline of 
the top step of the Parthenon and a straight line joining 
its two ends is at the greatest only just two inches." 

Still another correction which Professor Smith al- 
ludes to, in respect to the vertical proportions of the 
building, he does not discuss more than to say: "The 
small additions, amounting in the entire length of the 
order to less than five inches, were made to the heights 
of the various members of the order, with a view to 
secure that from one definite point of view the effect of 
foreshortening should be exactly compensated, and so 
the building should appear to the spectator to be per- 
fectly proportioned." 

The Parthenon was not, as is popularly supposed, a 
temple for the worship of Minerva. The sanctuary for 
that particular purpose was in the Erechtheum, a triple 
temple, located upon the Acropolis not very far distant 
from the Parthenon, and having wings dedicated re- 



120 SOME OLD MASTERS 

spectively to Minerva Polias, to Erechtheus or Neptune, 
wherein was a well of salt water, and to the Xvmph 
Pandrosus, daughter of Cecrops. The Parthenon, how- 
ever, served as a national treasury and repository for 
the valuable offerings to the goddess, as well as "a cen- 
tral point for the Panathenaic festival," where prizes 
might be distributed to the victorious competitors. In- 
deed, the decorations of Phidias would tend to corrob- 
orate this inference, as the sculptured low relief of the 
frieze represented the Panathenaic procession. The 
rich relief carvings in the tympanums of the front and 
rear pediments of the building, also by Phidias, the de- 
signs of which may be found described in almost any 
work on Grecian art, have been reproduced in some of 
the vignettes of this book. 

In alluding to the Erechtheum, which, like the Par- 
thenon and the Propyhca, still presents shapely and 
beautiful ruins to grace the Acropolis, attract the tourist 
and lend to the lover of art the best criterion of the 
ideal age of Grecian architecture, we must mourn the 
fact that the architect who designed this magnificent 
example of the Ionic order is not known, and it is not 
likely that he ever will be. The building was not, 
finished at the time of the death of Pericles. Because 
of an inscription found in the Acropolis, and now in the 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 121 

British Museum, containing the particulars of a minute 
professional survey of the unfinished parts, made by an 
Athenian architect named Philocles, in the year 336 
B.C., this architect has been given by some the credit of 
having been the author of the entire structure ; but that 
he could not. have been is clearly proven by the known 
fact that much of the temple was constructed, as we have 
stated, in the time of Pericles, or about one hundred 
years earlier. Nothing further, by the way, is known 
of Philocles than is here given. 

About two thousand years had passed without that 
great leveller Time or the corroding influences of the 
elements marring to any very serious extent the beauty 
and completeness of the Parthenon, during which period 
it had suffered two changes most antagonistic to its orig- 
inal purpose, having been transformed at one time into 
a Christian church and at another into a Turkish 
mosque. In respect to the first transformation, it is well 
to note that the significance of its name was not 
wholly lost in the change. Parthenon means Virgin, 
and the Christians called the church into which they 
turned it the Church of the Blessed Virgin. It was seen 
entire by Spon and Wheeler in 1676. But when the 
Venetians, in their war with the Turks, eleven years 
later, besieged the citadel, they threw a bomb upon the 



122 SOME OLD MASTERS 

roof of the noble structure, which, passing through it, 
ignited the powder which had been stored in the build- 
ing by the Turks. The result was an explosion which 
divided and reduced the temple to its present condition, 
save for further depredations which seem hardly credit- 
able. The iconoclastic Turks found this pride of Peri- 
cles most useful as a quarry upon which to draw for 
much of the material used in their own buildings, and it 
is to be regretted also that Lord Elgin should have found 
it necessary to enrich a distant museum in London with 
many of its most beautiful carvings, adding further 
desecration to "what Goth and Turk and Time had 
spared." Vitruvius informs us that Ictinus, in collab- 
oration with another architect, not otherwise mentioned, 
wrote a book upon the Parthenon, his greatest master- 
piece. 

After searching the world over for her dear, lost 
daughter, the beautiful Proserpine, who had been spir- 
ited away to the realm of Pluto, Ceres finally gave up 
the quest and mournfully settled down at Eleusis, a city 
in fertile Boeotia, about fourteen miles from Athens. 
Here was erected in her honor and in memory of Proser- 
pine an Ionic temple by the people for whom she became 
sponsor. The Persians, during their invasion of Attica, 
burned the temple, but Pericles caused it to be rebuilt. 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 123 

and selected Ictinus as the architect. He erected a hand- 
somer structure in the Doric style, which, it is said, was 
without exposed columns. 

Whether Ictinus lived long enough to complete the 
temple to Ceres and Proserpine or not, or was called 
away for other purposes, is not known, but it appears 
that other architects were associated with its design and 
erection, both before as well as after his connection with 
it. Corcebus is mentioned also as an architect, in the 
employ of Pericles, who began the work on the mystic 
cell, but that his sudden death resulted in the substitu- 
tion of Ictinus. It is more probable, however, that 
Ictinus had previously furnished the design of the build- 
ing and that Coroebus had been merely acting under 
his supervision. Following Ictinus was another Athe- 
nian architect appointed by Pericles, and the designer 
of the demos of Cholargos. He is said to have built 
the pediment of the temple with the timpanum open, 
according to an ancient fashion, in order to light the 
cell, which, if Strabo is to be believed, was capable of 
accommodating thirty thousand persons. 

In the time of Demetrius Phalereus, the immediate 
successor of Alexander, Philo, or Philon, as his name is 
sometimes written, a very eminent architect, also of 
Athens, was engaged to add a portico of twelve Doric 



124 SOME OLD MASTEES 

columns to this temple of Ceres. That Metagenes of 
Xypete, and son of Ctesiphon, who has already been 
discussed in our allusion to the temple of Diana at 
Ephesus, should be mentioned as the architect who com- 
pleted the entablature and an upper row of columns to 
this Eleusian temple, is probably a mistake. The time 
of Metagenes was, as we have seen, much earlier (about 
560 b.c), and while he might have been engaged upon 
the first temple to Ceres at Eleusis, it is quite impossible 
for him to have been employed by Pericles in the build- 
ing of that with which Ictinus had to do. 

When Alaric, the German, made his angry invasion 
into Greece in 396 b.c, because refused command of 
the armies of the Eastern empire, he destroyed very 
many works of Greek art, and this temple among them 
was one of the unfortunates that assisted to satiate his 
wrath. 

The third important work with which Ictinus is re- 
ported to have been connected was the Doric temple to 
Apollo in the village of Bassae, near Cotylion, in Ar- 
cadia, which was known as the temple to Apollo Epi- 
curus (the Preserver). Pausanias speaks of this as 
being next to that at Tagea, the finest temple in the 
Peloponnesus "from the beauty of its stone and the 
symmetry of its proportions." This temple is still a 



OF GEEEK ARCHITECTURE. 125 

beautiful ruin, thirty-four of the original thirty-eight 
columns of the peristyle standing. The structure, which 
in the interior possessed two rows of columns in the 
Ionic order, was originally admirably planned for 
sculptural decoration and statuary and held many fine 
specimens of the handiwork of Phidias and his school. 
Some of the carvings of the frieze and other parts of 
the building, which are to be seen in the British 
Museum, are spoken of by Lubke as the boldest and 
most animated compositions among all that is preserved 
to us of the productions of Greek art. 

On the southeast slope of the Acropolis Pericles 
caused to be erected a building which departed broadly 
from the prevailing rectangular construction of the 
time. In was oval on plan, Doric in order, and its por- 
tico was enclosed by thirty-two columns. The most 
original feature of the building, however, was the roof, 
which was constructed in the shape of a cone and was 
supported by rafters formed of the masts of the ships 
captured in the Persian wars. From just above the 
cornice of the drum there projected around the entire 
roof a row of windows which may possibly be credited 
with being the archetypes of our modern dormer win- 
dows. This building was called the Odeum, or, as it is 
now termed, the Odeon, and was devoted to music. 



126 SOME OLD MASTERS 

Cratinus, the comic poet, who had levelled his satire 
at Pericles when building the "Long Walls/' found in 
the roof of the Odeon, the idea for the cone shape of 
which, by the way, it is claimed the architects bor- 
rowed from the pavilion of the King of Persia, another 
mark for his shafts of ridicule. He sings : 

"As Jove, an onion on his head he wears ; 
As Pericles, a whole orchestra bears ; 
Afraid of broils and banishments no more, 
He tunes the shell he trembled at before." 

The allusion to an onion by Cratinus is explained 
when it is remembered that on account of the peculiar, 
long shape of his head the poets of Athens called Per- 
icles Schinocephalos, or squill-head, from schinos, a 
squill, or sea-onion. Another version of Cratinus's 
satire is given thus : 

" So, we see here, 
Jupiter Long-pate Pericles appear, 
Since ostracism time he's laid aside his head, 
And wears the new Odeum in its stead." 

Music received a considerable share of attention in 
the education of the Greeks, and such was the influence 
which it is said to have possessed over the physical as 
well as the mental nature of the people, that it was 
credited with being an antidote for many of the infirmi- 
ties of the bodv as well as the mind. The Odeon was 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 127 

therefore an institution of considerable importance in 
Athens. Here Pericles conducted in person the musi- 
cal contests between the Choruses which the wealthy 
citizens of Athens instituted, and awarded to the win- 
ners the tripod-trophies, which as marks of special 
honor they were permitted to place upon their monu- 
ments. A street in Athens was devoted almost entirely 
to these choragic monuments, many of which were archi- 
tecturally most beautiful. 

The architect of the Odeon of Pericles is not known, 
but after its destruction by Aristion in the Mithridatic 
war, it was rebuilt by Ariobarzanes II, Philopator, 
king of Cappadocia, in the original form, who em- 
ployed for the purpose the brother Roman architects, 
Caius and Marius Stallius, together with a third archi- 
tect by the name of Menalippus, who recorded their 
connection with the building upon the base of a statue 
which they erected in honor of their patron Ariobar- 
zanes. It is said that on certain days this later Odeon 
was used as a grain market. 

If in the Parthenon on the Acropolis the acme of 
Doric magnificence was reached by Ictinus and Callic- 
rates, there was another temple located below the 
Acropolis, which by many is ranked as the peer of the 
Parthenon, in its perfection of Doric symmetry and 



128 



SOME OLD MASTERS 



grace. This was the building to which allusion has 
already been made as another example of the genius and 
skill of Mnesicles, the slave-architect of the Propylsea. 
It was dedicated to the founder of Athens, the adven- 
turous Theseus, and stood not only as a temple in his 
honor, but as a mausoleum for his ashes. 

Wordsworth, whose words of praise for the Propylsea 
have been quoted, is also enthusiastic in his admiration 
of this second example of the skill of the talented 
Mnesicles : "Such is the integrity of its structure and 
the distinctness of its details that it requires no descrip- 
tion beyond that which a few glances might supply. Its 
beauty defies all ; its solid yet graceful form is, indeed, 
admirable; and the loveliness of its coloring is such 
that from the rich, mellow hue which the marble has now 
assumed it looks as if it had been quarried not from the 
bed of a rocky mountain, but from the golden light of an 
Athenian sunset." 

Although the temple of Theseus was one of the more 
modest Athenian temples in point of size, it has always 
ranked as one of the most perfect of the Attic-Doric 
order, and stands to-day as one of the least dilapidated 
among all that have existed of the beautiful edifices of 
ancient Greece. Indeed, as it was supposed to have been 
begun before the Parthenon, or in the time of Cimon, it 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 



129 



is claimed by some writers that Ictimis took it for his 
model, although the Parthenon was about twice as large. 
The Theseum was surrounded by columns, six at the 
front and rear and thirteen on either flank. It was forty- 
five feet wide by one hundred and four feet long. The 
building material was Pentelican marble, which in the 
course of the centuries has taken on the soft yellowish 
tinge which Bishop Wordsworth refers to. Ornamental 
sculpturing was more sparingly employed than upon the 
Parthenon or some of the other structures of the time, 
but such as was used was so judiciously handled as to 
o-ive the very noblest results. The sculpturing in the 
metopes of the frieze and on the pronaos was the work 

of Phidias. 

It was built after the battle of Marathon, and, it 
would seem, after an awakening on the part of the 
Athenians to that high sense of obligation toward their 
early hero, Theseus, which had slumbered for centuries. 
It was due to the Delphic Oracle that his remains were 
brought back to Athens from their long banishment in 
the island of Scyros, and given honorable burial, the 
son of Miltiades being selected to execute the Oracle's 
decree. The occasion was made one of festivity and re- 
joicing, and the entombment in the beautiful new tem- 
ple one of sacrifice and solemnity. 



130 SOME OLD MASTERS 

In closing this brief reference to the Theseum, the 
graceful lines from Haygarth's Greece, which so beauti- 
fully applaud it, may well be quoted : 

"Here let us pause, e'en at the vestibule 
Of Theseus's fane — with what stern majesty 
It rears its pond'rous and eternal strength, 
Still perfect, still unchang'd, as on the day 
When the assembled throng of multitudes 
With shouts proclaim'd tlr accomplish'd work and 

fell 
Prostrate upon their faces to adore 
Its marble splendor. How the golden gleam 
Of noonday floats upon its graceful forms, 
Tinging each grooved shaft, and storied frieze 
And Doric triglyph ! How the rays amidst 
The op'ning columns glanc'd from point to point 
Stream down the gloom of the long portico ; 
Where, link'd in moving mazes youths and maids 
Lead the light dance, as erst in joyous hour 
Of festival ! How the broad pediment, 
Embrown'd with shadow frowns above and spreads 
Solemnity and reverential awe ! 
Proud monument of old magnificence ! 
Still thou survivest, nor has envious time 
Impair' d thy beauty, save that it has spread 
A deeper tint, and dimm'd the polished glare 
Of thy refulgent whiteness. Let mine eyes 
Feast on thy form, and find at every glance 
Themes for imagination, and for thought ; 
Empires have fallen, yet art thou unchang'd ; 
And destiny, whose tide engulphs proud man 
Has rolPd his harmless billows at thv base." 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 131 

In the brilliant galaxy of great architects and sculp- 
tors of this age, none shines more deservedly conspicu- 
ous by reason of true merit and noble purpose than Poly- 
cletus of Argos, who is remembered more as a statuary 
than by reason of his achievements in architecture. He 
exercised his art between the years 452 and 412 b.c, 
and, like his distinguished contemporaries, Myron and 
Phidias, was a pupil of the Argive sculptor, Agelades. 
His celebrity has been compared to that of his most fa- 
mous brother pupil, Phidias, for the reason that while 
Phidias gave the ideal standard in the portrayal of 
deities, Polycletus created for all ages the perfect canon 
of the human form in art. This he expressed in the 
figure of a youth holding in his hand a spear, which was 
called the Doryphorus. In this figure the sculptor laid 
down the rules of universal application with regard to 
the proportions of the human body in its mean standard 
of height, breadth of chest, length of limbs and so on. 
Socrates, according to Xenophon, went so far as to 
place Polycletus on a level as a statuary, with Homer, 
Sophocles and Xeuxis in their respective arts. 

A similar anecdote to that told of Phidias, when he 
listened to the criticisms of the public upon his colossal 
statue of the Olympian Zeus, is also related of Poly- 
cletus. He is said to have made two statues, one of 



132 SOME OLD MASTERS 

which he perfected according to his own ideals, and the 
other he exhibited to the public and altered according to 
the suggestions volunteered. In due time he exhibited 
both publicly side by side. The one he had himself 
made was universally admired, while that which he had 
changed to suit the popular fancy was condemned. 
"You yourself," he exclaimed, "made the statue you 
abuse, I, the one you admire." 

One of his most celebrated works was the chrysele- 
phantine statue of Hera, executed in his old age to 
rival the Athene and Zeus by Phidias. Strabo con- 
sidered that this statue equalled in beauty those of 
Phidias, though it was surpassed by them in costliness 
and size. In the respect that Polycletus followed the 
Homeric description of Hera, and presented the goddess 
clothed from her waist down, he may be said to have 
followed the precedent of Phidias; in other respects, 
however, he drew upon his own fancy. Juno was seated 
upon a golden throne ; her head was crowned with a 
garland on which were worked the Graces and the 
Hours ; in one hand she held the symbolical pomegranate 
and in the other a sceptre surmounted by a cuckoo, a 
bird sacred to Hera on account of having herself been 
changed into that form by Zeus. 

As an architect Polycletus will be found as the 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 133 

designer of the theatre at Epidaurus, where was also 
located the beautiful temple dedicated to ^Esculapius, 
and which Pausanias pronounced to be superior in sym- 
metry and elegance to every other in Greece and Rome. 
It was capable of accommodating twelve thousand spec- 
tators, and its ruins, as well as those of the white marble 
circular Tholus, by the same artist, are still to be seen 
in an unusual condition of preservation. 

Among the other architects who have been variously 
mentioned as having pursued their profession toward 
the close of this century, but who can hardly take equal 
rank with those already alluded to, may be mentioned 
Eupolinus, an Argive artist, who rebuilt the great 
Herseum at Mycenae after its destruction by fire in the 
year 423 B.C., the entablature of which was ornamented 
with sculptures representing the wars of the gods and 
giants and the Trojan wars; Clecetas, who was one of 
the assistant architects under Phidias, and whose chief 
claim to distinction is based upon his construction of 
the starting place in the Olympian Stadium, and Democ- 
opus Myrilla, who built the theatre at Syracuse. Vitru- 
vius also speaks of an architect and author of about this 
time — namely, Silenus — who wrote on the Doric order. 

It is difficult to close this chapter, in which bi t very 
superficial reference has been made to the architectural 



134 SOME OLD MASTEKS 

lights of the golden age of art in Greece, without glanc- 
ing back at the magnificent city of Athens, the grand 
product of much of their creative skill, with feelings of 
regret that with all her numerous and noble monuments, 
dedicated to gods and men, there is not one that bears 
the imprint of its creator. We see in this glance forest- 
like colonnades of glittering white columns ; we see the 
House of the Five Hundred Senators, the Tholus, the 
Hall of Hermse, the Agora, the Pnyx, "where the 
Athenian orator spoke from a block of bare stone ;" the 
Stoic Hall, in which philosophy was taught ; the Pryta- 
neum, where the loved laws of Solon were preserved ; the 
Lyceum, with its hundred columns from Lydia ; the 
Theatre of Bacchus and the Mausoleum of Tolus. We 
see temples innumerable, the grandest of all those to 
Jupiter and Theseus ; but others of fascinating merit, 
those of Ceres and of Cybele and of Mars, and of Vul- 
can, of Venus, of ^Eacus, of the Dioscuri, of Hercules, 
of Diana Agrotera, of Bacchus Lunmeus, of ^Esculapius, 
of Eumenides, and that to Glory, erected with the booty 
from the glorious field of Marathon, wherein stood the 
Venus of Phidias ; and we see the Acropolis towering 
above all, lending other magnificent architectural tri- 
umphs to the ensemble ; and although we see slabs 
among them "inscribed with the records of Athenian 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 



135 



history, with civil contracts and articles of peace, with 
memorials of honors awarded to patriotic citizens or 
munificent strangers," we find no monument, whether 
in the time of Pericles or later, inscribed with the name 
of Ictinus, or Hippodamus, or Callicrates, or the poor 
slave, Mnesicles, who was saved by Minerva to be for- 
gotten by man. 



136 SOME OLD MASTERS 



CHAPTER VII. 



LATER GREEK ARCHITECTS. 



|HE first architect as well as artist of decided 
J merit who arose to historic distinction at the 
Jbeginning of the later Attic school, or that 



1 which followed immediately upon the school of Phidias, 
and one of the first to treat the Corinthian idea, then 
flowering into favor with originality and artistic skill, 
was the deserving and accomplished Scopas. Refer- 
ence has already been made to this artist in connection 
with the temple of Diana at Ephesus, for which, it is 
said, he furnished the most beautiful of all the numer- 
ous columns with which that temple was enriched. This 
statement is made without prejudice to the great Praxi- 
teles, who was contemporaneous with Scopas, and who 
excelled him as a statuary, if he did not compete with 
him as an architect. 

A mistake of Pliny, which assigned Scopas to an 
earlier age, has finally been corrected, and it has been 
settled that the period when he exercised his art was 



OF GEEEK ARCHITECTURE. 137 

between the years 395 and 350 b.c. Scopas was a 
native of Paros, a subject island of Athens, and sprung 
from a family which for several generations before his 
advent into the world had practised the plastic arts. His 
descendants- also walked in the same artistic paths of 
life for many generations. Like Polycletus, with whom 
he is most favorably compared, the architectural side 
of his career was greatly eclipsed by that which dis- 
played his genius as a sculptor. 

His statues were numerous, and fortunately many of 
them still exist scattered in various European museums 
and galleries. Among such of his works considered the 
most interesting is the well-known series of figures 
representing the destruction of the sons and daughters 
of Xiobe. In the time of Pliny these statues stood in 
the temple of Apollo Socianus at Rome, and it was then 
a question whether they were the works of Scopas or 
Praxiteles. In fact, many of the former's finest efforts 
have been attributed to the latter artist. Of this group 
Sehlegel says: "In the group of Xiobe there is the 
most perfect expression of terror and pity. The up- 
turned looks of the mother, and mouth half open in 
supplication, seem to accuse the invisible wrath of 
Heaven. The daughter clinging in the agonies of 
death to the bosom of her mother, in her infantile inno- 



138 SOME OLD MASTERS 

cence can have no other fear than for herself ; the innate 
impulse of self-preservation was never represented in a 
manner more tender or affecting. Can there on the 
other hand be exhibited to the senses a more beautiful 
image of self-devoting, heroic magnanimity than Xiobe, 
as she bends her body forward that, if possible, she may 
alone received the destructive bolt ? Pride and repug- 
nance are melted down in the most ardent maternal love. 
The more than earthly dignity of the features is the 
less disfigured by pain, as from the quick repetition of 
the shocks she appears, as in the fable, to have become 
insensible and motionless. Before this figure, twice 
transformed into stone, and yet so inimitably animated 
— before this line of demarcation of all human suffer- 
ing the most callous beholder is dissolved in tears." 

Another highly esteemed work of Scopas, which Pliny 
says stood in the shrine of Cneius Domitius in the Fla- 
minian circus in Rome, represented Achilles conducted 
to the island of Leuce by the divinities of the sea. It 
consisted of figures of Xeptune, Thetis and Achilles 
surrounded by Nereids sitting on dolphins and other 
large fish, and attended by Tritons and sea monsters. 
In the opinion of Pliny, these figures alone would have 
been sufficient to have immortalized the artist, even if 
they had cost the labor of his entire life. 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 139 

His statues of Venus, are, after all, perhaps the most 
remarkable of his works in sculpture. One of these 
statues, if not the original, is supposed to have been the 
prototype of one of the most celebrated and beautiful 
portrayals of that charming deity in the world to-day. 
Another to which Pliny gives particular prominence 
was that in which the goddess is presented nude and 
which was found in the temple of Brutus Callaicus in 
Rome. This statue, he adds, "would have conferred re- 
nown upon any other city, but at Rome the immense 
number of works of art and the bustle of daily life in a 
great city distracted the attention of men." It is prob- 
ably this work of art, which is thought by some to have 
been superior to that by Praxiteles, which, with some 
modifications, is credited with being the model after 
which Cleomenes fashioned the celebrated Venus de 
Medicis. Pausanias and Pliny mention also other por- 
trayals of Venus by Scopas, but it is left to Waagen and 
some other critics to ascribe the celebrated statue of 
Aphrodite, in the Louvre in Paris, and known as the 
Venus de Milo, to this great sculptor and architect. 

It is foreign to the purpose, however, to devote too 
much space to this side of the art life of Scopas, but in 
treating of his connection with the magnificent mauso- 
leum which Artemesia erected at Halicarnassus, to her 



140 SOME OLD MASTERS 

husband, Mausolus, king of Caria, it will be argued 
doubtless that the work of this artist on that famous 
mortuary monument, which ranked as one of the seven 
wonders of the world, was more in the line of a deco- 
rative sculptor than of an architect. 

In this undertaking Scopas was associated with three 
other architectural sculptors — namely, Bryaxis, Timo- 
theus and Leocarus — all of whom were Athenians. Each 
took as his special work the decoration of one side of the 
building, Scopas choosing the east or principal facade. 
The north and south sides had a width of about sixty- 
three feet ; the east and west were not quite so vide. 

Before outlining further the principal characteristics 
of the building, it is only fair to say that the professional 
architects to whom is due the credit for the plan of the 
structure were Phileus, an Ionian whose name Vitru- 
vius spells in a variety of ways, and Satyrus, whose 
native city is not given, but who, according to the same 
authority, wrote a description of the mausoleum. 
Phileus was also an author on architecture, having writ- 
ten a volume on the Ionic temple of Athene Polias at 
Priene, of which he was the designer, and which was 
one of the most renowned buildings in Asia Minor, and 
a treatise on the mausoleum, which was also located in 
that part of the globe. As for Satyrus, whatever may 



. OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 141 

have been the other public buildings of which he was the 
architect, there is no record. 

The mausoleum had a total height of one hundred 
and forty feet, and in general appearance combined 
orientalism in tomb-structure with the perfections of 
Grecian architectural grace and elegance. The tomb 
was contained within a rectangular substructure. Above 
was an Ionic peristyle temple with nine columns on each 
side and eleven at the ends. The frieze was elaborately 
carved and decorated, and the roof, which was pyram- 
idal in form, gave the oriental cast to the entire build- 
ing. At the apex of the roof was a colossal marble 
quadriga, in which a statue of the deceased king 
Mausolus appeared. It is said that in the sculptures 
and carvings of the different sides the respective 
artists strove to rival each other, and that although 
queen Artemesia died before the tomb was finished 
the four artists were so interested and absorbed in their 
work that they determined to complete it at their own 
risk. 

Up to the twelfth century after the Christian era 
this grand tomb stood in a fairly good state of preserva- 
tion, but soon after fell to pieces, and was used from 
that time as a quarry by the Knights of St. John, from 
which they took stone for the castles they built on the 



142 SOME OLD MASTERS 

site of the old Greek Acropolis. Later still much of the 
marble was taken to repair their fortifications, and it is 
even said to make lime, showing to what ignominious 
uses the very greatest of architectural glories may finally 
come. However, some of the carvings have been re- 
deemed from the fortification walls and unearthed from 
other places in Budrun, the modern Halicarnassus, to 
find a final resting place, let it be hoped, in the British 
Museum. These rescued pieces of marble, of which 
there are perhaps sufficient to reconstruct a quarter of 
the whole frieze, though they are not continuous, are 
pronounced by competent judges to be specimens of the 
work of the different artists, but there is no means of 
determining which of them, if any, came from the chisel 
of Scopas. 

The temple of Athene Alea at Tegea in Arcadia, often 
a sanctuary for fugitives from Sparta, was an archi- 
tectural creation of Scopas, which it would appear be- 
longed to him exclusively. Of all the temples in the 
Peloponnesus this is said by Pausanias to have been the 
largest as well as the most magnificent. That observant 
traveller, however, must have been carried away some- 
what by his enthusiasm over its architectural attrac- 
tions in ascribing to it such great size, as its dimensions 
were not more than one hundred and sixtv-four bv sev- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 143 

enty feet, being very much smaller than other Grecian 
temples. 

The temple which Scopas built was not the first to 
the goddess to occupy the same site, but followed a very 
much more ancient one, which was destroyed by fire in 
the year 394 b.c. The tendency to introduce the Corin- 
thian order, which followed after the Peloponnesian 
wars, and which continued to grow as Greece became 
more and more intermixed with Roman ideas, is here 
early displayed. The columnar arrangement of the 
temple was unusual ; for the outside the Ionic style was 
used, there being six columns at each end and fourteen 
on the sides ; but on the inside the Doric order was em- 
ployed surmounted by the Corinthian. Both pediments 
of the building were sculptured by Scopas or from his 
designs under his immediate supervision. The pedi- 
ment over the front portico portrayed the chase of the 
Calydonian boar, and that in the rear the battle of Tele- 
phus with Achilles ; both being, according to Pausanias, 
very animated compositions. The statue of the goddess 
Athene Alea, contained in the cell, was carried off by 
the Emperor Augustus and placed at the entrance of his 
new forum in Rome. Some fragments of the pedi- 
mental sculptures have been discovered and placed in 
the British Museum. 



144 SOME OLD MASTERS 

To Scopas, in co-operation with Praxiteles, is also 
attributed the graceful and beautiful Choragic monu- 
ment of Lysicrates, at one time called "the lantern of 
Demosthenes/' from the mistaken supposition that the 
great orator used it as a study — a very strange use when 
it is remembered that the little structure possessed 
neither doors nor windows. In its day this monument 
was the pride of the street of Tripods, and it still stands 
one of the best preserved evidences of the taste and skill 
of its designers. 

In this monument the Corinthian style of decoration 
is displayed in its perfection of grace, better, perhaps, 
than in any other structure of that early time which is 
known to us. Stuart describes it as follows: "The 
colonnade was constructed in the following manner: 
six equal panels of white [Pentelic] marble, placed 
contiguous to each other on a circular plan, formed 
a continued cylindrical wall, which of course was 
divided from top to bottom into six equal parts by the 
junctures of the panels. These columns projected 
somewhat more than half their diameters from the 
surface of the cylindrical wall, and the wall entirely 
closed up the intercolumination. Over this was placed 
the entablature and the cupola, in neither of which 
any aperture was made, so that there was no admis- 



OF GKEEK AKCHITECTUKE. 145 

sion to the inside of this monument, and it was quite 
dark." 

The "flower," or crowning ornament of the monu- 
ment, was a particularly graceful and beautiful ar- 
rangement of acanthus leaves and volutes, and the roof 
was worked out with great delicacy and originality in 
the form of a thatch of laurel leaves and Vitruvian 
scrolls. If there was any apportionment of the work 
on this monument between Scopas and Praxiteles, it 
would be interesting to know what it was. 

Of the other architectural sculptors associated with 
Scopas in the adornment of the tomb of Mausolus none 
is mentioned as having had any other connection with 
architecture in a similar way, but all were statuaries of 
distinction and high merit, who executed works in mar- 
ble or bronze, or both, that gave them prominence in 
their art. Among other works by Bryaxis were five colos- 
sal statues in the island of Rhodes, of which the celebrated 
"colossus of Rhodes," however, was not one, and also a 
statue of Apollo, which was destined for the temple of 
Daphnis near Antiochus. The story is related that 
Julian the Apostate wished to render to this figure 
peculiar worship and homage, but was prevented from 
so doing by a miraculous destruction of the temple and 
statue bv fire. Clement of Alexandria asserts that 



146 SOME OLD MASTERS 

Bryaxis was the artist of many works ascribed to Phid- 
ias. 

As to the share which Timotheus took in the decora- 
tion of the mausoleum there is dispute among the Greek 
authorities, some ascribing his work to Praxiteles ; but 
there does not seem to be any just foundation for the 
supposition that the sculpturing on the south side of the 
tomb was by any other hand than that of Timotheus. 
As one of the great statuaries of the later Attic school 
he was also among the most prominent, his figure of 
Artemis being deemed worthy to be placed by the side 
of the Apollo of Scoj)as, and the Latona of Praxiteles 
in the temple which Augustus erected to Apollo on the 
Palatine. Other statues of conspicuous merit are aiso 
ascribed to him by Pausanias and Pliny. 

Leochares, the last of the quartette, was also inferior 
only to Scopas and Praxiteles in his school of art. He 
was particularly skilful with portrait-statues, the most 
successful of which were those of Philip of Macedon, 
Alexander his son, Amyntas, Olympias and Eurydice, 
all of which were made of ivory and gold, and were 
placed in the Phillippeion, a circular building in the 
Altis at Olympia, erected by Philip in celebration of 
his victory at Cha?roneia. But the chef d'oeuvre of 
Leochares was a bronze statue of the rape of Ganymede. 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 



147 



Pliny says of this work that the eagle seemed to be sensi- 
ble of what he was carrying and to whom he was bearing 
the treasure, taking care not to hurt the boy through his 
dress with his talons. The original statue was fre- 
quently copied both in marble and on gems, several of 
which copies are still extant : one in the ]\Iuseo Pio- 
Clementino, another in the library of St. Mark in 
Venice, and still another figures in Stuart's Athens, as 
an alto-relievo found among the ruins of Thessalonica. 




148 SOME OLD MASTERS 




CHAPTEK VIII. 

THE ALEXANDRIAN ERA AND ROMAN SPOLIATION. 

HAT epoch in the art life of the Hellenic people 
_|_ associated with the influences arising out of the 
career and conquests of Alexander the Great, 
which we have now reached, was one scarcely inferior 
in interest to that of the time of Pericles. Overflowing 
as was the great Macedonian leader's love of art and 
great as was his ambition to leave behind him lasting 
monuments that should fittingly stand for the artistic 
culture of his time, still, for reasons arising partly out 
of his own career and partly from the ever-changing im- 
pulses of human feeling and taste, the art culture of his 
time must bow to the- superiority of that of the time of 
Pericles, if, in respect to those other features of his 
leadership and accomplishment, to which history gives 
a superior rank, his genius is eclipsed by none in the 
chronicles of civilization. 

Alexander's short life, so active in conquest and war, 
and so much of it passed away from European associa- 



OF GEEEK ARCHITECTURE. 149 

tions or even the influences of colonial Greece, neces- 
sarily gave him little time for indulgence in the arts at 
home, while it permitted him to manifest it to some 
considerable extent in founding cities and rearing tem- 
ples in foreign lands. To this self-imposed banishment, 
accompanied, as it was, by large armies brought from 
Greece and her colonies, and the intermixing of her 
people with foreigners of new tastes and habits of mind, 
may be attributed that change of art feeling at home 
which began to assert itself about this time. On the 
other hand, however, its effect was beneficial to the con- 
quered countries in introducing a more elevated art 
standard than had existed within them before. 

Personally, Alexander manifested a keen apprecia- 
tion of the arts ; whether founded upon the same sin- 
cerity as that which appeared more natural to the char- 
acter of Pericles is a question ; but we find that Praxi- 
teles, Lysippus and Apelles, the great artists of his 
time, were no less publicly honored or more highly flat- 
tered thah were Phidias or Polycletus in the days of 
Pericles. It is related as an evidence of Alexander's en- 
thusiasm for art, that he compensated Apelles for his 
celebrated portrait of him by ordering that the artist's 
reward should be measured out in gold instead of being 
counted, an order which perhaps quite as much illus- 



150 SOME OLD MASTERS 

trated the theatrical impulses of which he could be 
guilty as the calm expression of a genuine appreciation. 

Even had Alexander been spared, and had returned 
to Greece to continue a long life of usefulness to his 
people, instead of having been cut off in his prime at 
Babylon, although he might have done much more for 
art than he did, still he could not have accomplished for 
it what had been attained by Pericles. This may be 
argued from his birth, schooling and the stronger trend 
of his mind, which led in very different directions. 
The Macedonian had not certainly the traditions of art 
culture in his veins, as was the case with the more pol- 
ished Athenian, and being fonder of the dazzlement of 
pomp and show, natural to a leader who from infancy 
had been almost continuously associated with the accou- 
trements and regalia of armies, it is not likely that what- 
ever he might have accomplished for art more than that 
which he actually did, would have manifested that 
purity of ideal, as well as refinement of execution which 
so marked and dignified the work of Pericles. 

As there is always some time which must elapse be- 
fore the tide, having reached its flood, turns once more 
to slowly ebb, so was there a time to be expressed in a 
few years when the plastic arts of Greece, reaching their 
highest development in the age of Pericles, remained 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 151 

stationary, before ebbing away to so-called Roman de- 
generacy, and the mixed influence of various compara- 
tively uncultured nationalities. 

The Alexandrian epoch marks the beginning of this 
turning-point. The decadence took almost as many suc- 
cessive generations to the time when Corinth was sacked 
by the Romans in 116 b.c.^ and the Italian soldiers 
cast their dice upon the pictures of Aristides, as it had 
taken to advance in the earlier ages of Greece, to the time 
when the chryselephantine statues of Zeus and Athene, 
by Phidias, were the recognized perfect standards of 
godlike majesty and beauty, and the Doryphorus of 
Polycletus was accepted as the criterion of human grace 
and proportion. 

Of course the standard by which the perfection of 
architectural dignity and purity can be measured is 
largely one of individual taste and preferment, as is 
sometimes evidenced by the conflicting judgments of 
the best critical authorities, but if we accept the conclu- 
sions of centuries of the highest criticism, we must be 
prepared to concede that the arts to which we refer 
reached their zenith as stated. However, the expression, 
Roman degeneracy, is much too severe a one, if taken 
in other than a comparative sense ; for, whatever Grecian 
architecture may have lost in ideal a?stheticism by 



152 SOME OLD MASTERS 

reason of Roman interference, it must be granted the 
Romans that their own evolution in the appreciation of 
the arts and the accomplishments of architecture re- 
sulted in a magnificence which, when compared with our 
own time, gives them rank second only to the Greeks, 
from whom they borrowed so much, and whom they did 
not scruple to rob of nearly all their portable art treas- 
ures. "Among the innumerable monuments of archi- 
tecture constructed by the Romans," says Gibbon, "how 
many have escaped the notice of history, how few have 
resisted the ravages of time and barbarism ! And yet 
even the majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy 
and the provinces would be sufficient to prove that those 
countries were once the seat of a polite and powerful 
empire. Their greatness alone or their beauty might 
deserve our attention ; but they were rendered more in- 
teresting by two important circumstances, which con- 
nect the agreeable history of the arts with the more 
useful history of human manners. Many of these works 
were erected at private expense, and almost all were 
intended for public benefit."' 

But the burnishing of the Romans to the high polish 
which they finally attained in the arts was a slow proc- 
ess, and one which met with many interruptions, ac- 
cording as their rulers were individually affected bv a 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 153 

love of the artistic — a fact which in itself would show 
that art was not an inherent quality in the Roman 
nature to the like degree that it was in that of the Greek. 
To admire the Grecian aesthetic culture was at first con- 
sidered an evidence of effeminacy, and even Cato ex- 
claimed against the arts not seventeen years after the 
taking of Syracuse. The Consul jMummius, in 14G 
B.C., some hundred years later, after the battle which 
resulted in the capture of Corinth, proved very conclu- 
sively that he had very little appreciation of the merit of 
the treasures he found there, for he not only destroyed a 
great many, but shipped to Rome many more, for the 
simple reason that, recognizing how much they were 
prized by the Corinthians, he wisely saw that they might 
be useful in Rome. This sacking of Grecian cities was 
quite popular, and the Roman generals, in their con- 
quests, seemed to strive which should bring away to 
Rome the greatest number of statues and pictures. The 
elder Scipio despoiled Spain and Africa, Flamius Sylla 
and Mummius exported shiploads of the art of Greece, 
JEmilius despoiled Macedonia, and Scipio the younger, 
when he destroyed Carthage, transferred to Rome the 
chief ornaments of that city. 

In fact, the Roman generals were remarkable as art 
pilferers, using the spoils not alone to adorn their public 



154 SOME OLD MASTERS 

buildings and institutions, but in some instances their 
private houses and palaces as well. It is related of 
Scaurus that he embellished his temporary theatre, 
erected for a few days' use, with no less than three thou- 
sand statues. He also returned to Rome with all the 
pictures of S icy on, one of the most eminent schools of 
painting in Greece, on a pretence that they would com- 
pensate for a debt due the Roman people. From this 
habit of drawing on foreigners it finally came to pass 
that private citizens took the fever and entered upon the 
luxury. None was earlier in the field than the Luculli, 
particularly Lucius Lucullus. Julius Ca?sar was per- 
sonally a great collector, his. hobby being gems, while his 
successor, Augustus, displayed an acute interest in Co- 
rinthian vases. 

Augustus did much for the architectural adornment 
of Rome, and his much-quoted remark to the effect that 
he found Rome a city of bricks and left it one of marble, 
was, to a great degree, true. In fact, Augustus mani- 
fested an aesthetic nature in many respects. Spence 
says, speaking of the arts, that ''the flavor of Augustus, 
like a gentle dew, made them bud forth and blossom ; and 
the sour reign of Tiberius, like a sudden frost, checked 
their growth, and killed all their beauties." Men of 
genius were flattered, courted and enriched under Au- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 155 

gustus, as they were some four hundred years' earlier in 
Athens under Pericles, with the result that Vergil, 
Horace, Ovid and other poets of the greatest merit 
sprung forward. Rome became in this age the seat of 
universal government also, its wealth was enormous, its 
architectural decorations numerous and splendid, and 
even its common streets were decked with some of the 
finest statues in the world. Other great architectural 
epochs of Rome were those of the time of Trojan and 
Hadrian. But as evidence of the intermittent character 
of her art development, very little was realized, as very 
little could be expected under the reigns of such mon- 
sters as Tiberius, Caligula and Xero. To Xero, how- 
ever, we must accord some little credit in having built a 
very remarkable architectural composition, although un- 
dertaken for no public benefit, but to satisfy his own 
profligate vanity. His ''Golden Palace," built under 
the direction of the architects Celer and Severus, the 
most eminent of their time, was ranked as the most "stu- 
pendous" structure of its kind in all Ttaly. The palace 
was built after the conflagration during which Xero is 
supposed to have amused himself with a violin. Tacitus 
tells us that it was ornamented in every part with 
"pearls, gems and the most precious materials," espe- 
cially gold, which was used in reckless profusion. In 



156 SOME OLD MASTEES 

the centre of a court adorned with a portico of three rows 
of lofty columns, each row a mile long, stood a colossal 
statue of that colossal sensualist and wicked monarch, 
which was one hundred and twenty feet in height. Ves- 
pasian tore down the whole of this piece of architectural 
vanity, restored the land which it had occupied and by 
which it was surrounded to the people from whom it 
had been stolen, and erected in its place the great public 
Coloseum and the magnificent Temple of Peace. 

In alluding to the public palaces of amusement, Curio, 
a Roman Pnetor, some few years before the Christian 
era, is said to have built two wooden theatres close to- 
gether, which turned on pivots. During the day they 
were turned away from each other, and different plays 
were performed in each ; then, with all the spectators, 
they were turned together, forming an amphitheatre in 
which combats took place. The zeal of the Roman archi- 
tects to win popular favor by something novel and strik- 
ing was often very great. In Pompey's theatre water 
was made to run down the aisles, between the seats, in 
order to refresh spectators in the heat of summer. 

But that the Roman architects were not always as 
careful in the inspection of the buildings under their 
supervision as they should have been, and, like some of 
our modern architects, permitted their works to be used 



OF GEEEK ARCHITECTURE. 157 

when in an unsafe condition, is shown from the unfor- 
tunate catastrophe which resulted in the unexpected 
tumbling to pieces of the theatre of Fideme near Rome. 
This accident happened in the reign of Tiberius, and 
the name of the architect who suffered banishment for 
his neglect was Attilius. The theatre was built of 
wood, and out of fifty thousand people who were in- 
jured in the collapse twenty thousand are said to have 
died. 

Of all the Roman emperors none is more interesting 
to the student of Grecian architecture than Hadrian, 
who was a great admirer of Greece, seeking to introduce 
the Hellenic institutions and modes of worship in Rome, 
as well as the art, poetry and learning of Greece. He 
also undertook to restore Athens, which had suffered 
greatly during the four or five hundred years which had 
elapsed between his time and that of Pericles, to some- 
thing of her former architectural grandeur. Pope's 
couplet might have been Hadrian's inspiration : 

"You, too, proceed ! make falling arts your care, 
Erect new wonders and the old repair." 

Indeed, he caused to be inscribed upon the Arch of 
Honor, which he erected in Athens, after the restoration, 
two inscriptions which, if not in the best of taste, were 
in harmony with their author's self-love, of which he 



158 SOME OLD MASTERS 

possessed no inconsiderable share. Upon that side of 
the arch which faced the ancient city he wrote : "This 
is Athens, the old city of Theseus," and on that which 
fronted upon the new city of his restoration and adorn- 
ment was inscribed : "This is the city of Hadrian, and 
not of Theseus." In other words, the visitor was ex- 
pected to make his own comparison and perhaps draw 
the conclusion intimated that Theseus was not, after all, 
to be compared with the Roman Hadrian. 

Hadrian's particular penchant was architecture, and 
his predominant vices were vanity and jealousy, both of 
which were manifested in his practice of that art. The 
magnificent villa which he erected at Tiber, where he 
spent his declining years, and the ruins of which even 
now cover a space equal to a large town, would indicate 
this, as well as the grandiose mausoleum which towered 
high above the banks of the Tiber at Rome, and which 
is now depleted of much of its statuary and ornamenta- 
tion, the Christian church of Saint Angelo. The treat- 
ment which he accorded Trajan's great architect, the 
accomplished Apollodorus, is still another evidence of 
his vanity. 

Hadrian, like Louis I. of Bavaria, found delight in 
practising personally the profession of architecture, and 
drew plans of buildings, which the people thought was 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 159 

"unbecoming a prince. Possibly this objection was raised 
to discourage their ruler rather than the more truthful 
one that, his plans were not up to the high standard of 
his time. However that may be, he insisted upon their 
being executed, and it is said was rather pleased if the 
architects found fault with them. But this was not the 
case with Apollodorus, whether because of what he had 
accomplished for his predecessor Trajan, or because of 
professional jealousy. 

Apollodorus was the architect of the Trajan column, 
composed of only twenty-four stones, although one hun- 
dred and twenty-eight Roman feet in height, and the 
square which surrounded it, considered the most beau- 
tiful assemblage of buildings then known. The relief 
carvings which were wound spirally around the Trajan 
column like a ribbon, represented the incidents of 
the expedition against the Darians. The column sup- 
ported a statue of Trajan, which Pope Sextus V. substi- 
tuted for one of Saint Peter. A greater absurdity can 
hardly be conceived than that of placing a peaceful 
apostle over the warlike representations of the Dacian 
war. 

Apollodorus was also the architect and engineer of the 
srreat bridge which stretched across the Danube in lower 
Hungary, which was formed of twelve piers and twenty- 



160 SOME OLD MASTEKS 

two arches, said to have been the grandest use of the 
arch in such works. Each arch was sixty feet wide and 
one hundred and fifty feet high. The total height of 
the bridge was three hundred feet and its length a mile 
and a half. Hadrian destroyed this magnificent work, 
some say through fear of its use by barbarians, others 
through jealousy. Perhaps the circumstances attending 
the death of Apollodorus would point to the second rea- 
son as the true one. 

Hadrian had made the drawings of the double temple 
of Venus at Rome, which he submitted to Apollodorus, 
doubtless for his commendation rather than his criti- 
cism. The architect saw at a glance that the sitting 
figures of the two goddesses, Roma and Venus, which 
the Emperor had introduced in the little temple, were 
out of proportion, and so large that if they stood up they 
would bump their heads against the roof, if they did not 
take it off entirely. He called the Emperor's attention 
to this fact with the result that Hadrian became very 
angry, or pretended to be so, and Apollodorus lost his 
head for his frankness. 

The favorite architect of Hadrian was Detrianus, to 
whom he entrusted many of his most important under- 
takings. We find that he restored the Pantheon of 
Agrippa, the Basilica of Xeptune, the Forum of Au- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 161 

gustus and the Baths of Agrippina. As original works 
he designed the Mausoleum of Hadrian, to which we 
have already alluded ; the bridge of ^Elius, ornamented 
with its covering of brass, and supported by its forty-two 
columns, terminating at the top with as many statues, 
and the villa at Tivoli. He also erected many structures 
for his royal patron in Gaul, among which was the 
Basilica Plotina, the most superb building in that coun- 
try, and again other buildings in England. The Roman 
wall from Eden in Cumberland to Tyne in Northumber- 
land, a distance of eighty miles, which was built as a 
defence against the Caledonians, is attributed to Detria- 
nus. In Greece he embellished the famous temple of 
Jupiter Olympus, and in Palestine he rebuilt Jerusalem, 
erected a theatre and various pagan temples out of the 
stone from the Jewish temples, and completed his sac- 
rilege there by placing a statue of Jupiter on the spot 
where Christ rose from the dead, and one of Venus on 
Mount Calvary. A feat, however, which has perpetu- 
ated his fame quite as much as any other of his profes- 
sional acchievements was the removing of the colossal 
bronze statue of jSTero, which stood in the court of the 
"Golden Palace." This difficult task he is said to have 
accomplished without changing the erect posture of the 
huge figure, which, it will be remembered, was one hun- 



162 SOME OLD MASTERS 

dred and twenty-eight feet high, by the assistance of 
twenty-four elephants. 

In returning once more to the Greek architects who 
have been left, while a rather garrulous ramble has been 
made into the architectural personality of Rome, it may 
be well not to attempt to do so at once, but to pause for 
a moment, since we are so far from the chronology of 
our subject, while the reader makes the acquaintance of 
two Hellenic artists who, in the time of Quintius Metel- 
lus, 147 B.C., found professional employment in Roman 
territory. 

Metellus was one of the first Romans to favor magnifi- 
cent architecture in his home capitol, and with the 
booty gathered in his Macedonian campaigns he erected 
two temples in Rome, said to have been the first temples 
built of marble in that city, one of which was dedicated 
to Jupiter Stator, and the other to the white-armed 
Juno. The interiors were profusely ornamented with 
the works of the great Grecian masters, Praxiteles, Poly- 
cletus and Dionysius figuring largely. 

The names of the architects which Metellus brought 
or imported from Greece for this work were Saurus 
and Batrachus, who may possibly have been Ionians, 
inasmuch as they employed the Ionic order. These tem- 
ples were restored in the Corinthian style, under Augus- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 



163 



tus, two hundred years later, by Hermodorus of Sala- 
mis, who was also the architect of the temple of Mars in 
the Flaminian Circus. 

It is told of Saurus and Batrachus that they were so 
much pleased with their work that they asked for no 
reward other than the privilege of having their names 
inscribed on the temples. But as this honor was denied 
them, they resorted to expedient to effect the same end. 
As the name Saurus stood for lizard and Batrachus for 
frog, they carved lizards and frogs on the temples, and 
were comparatively satisfied. A rather absurd mistake 
occurred in respect to these two temples after they were 
completed. It seems that nothing remained to be done 
but to add the statues of Jupiter and Juno to each re- 
spectively ; but by some strange oversight the figure of 
Jupiter was erected in the house of Juno, and that of 
Juno before the shrine of Jupiter. However, as the 
two deities were rather closely connected by marriage, 
the mistake was conveniently attributed to a whim of 
the gods and was not remedied. 



164 



SOME OLD MASTERS 



CHAPTEK IX. 



THE ALEXANDRIAN ARCHITECTS. 





HE boldest, most ingenious and original archi- 
tect who found favor in the sight of Alexander 
the Great was undoubtedly Dinocrates, who, 
like his august patron, was also a Macedonian, and to 
whom an allusion has already been made in connection 
with the temple of Diana at Ephesus. 

His very introduction into the notice and attention 
of his distinguished fellow-countryman would tend to 
prove that Dinocrates was a person of expediency, if 
nothing else. Let Vitruvius tell the story : "Dinoc- 
rates, the architect, relying on the powers of his skill 
and ingenuity, while Alexander was in the midst of his 
conquests, set out from Macedonia to the army, desirous 
of gaining the commendation of his sovereign. That his 
introduction to the royal presence might be facilitated, 
he obtained letters from his countrymen and relations 
to men of the first rank and nobility about the king's per- 
son, by whom, being kindly received, he besought them 




DINOCRATES BEFORE U.EXAMIKR THE CREAT. 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 165 

to take the earliest opportunity of accomplishing his 
wish. They promised fairly, but were slow in perform- 
ing, waiting, as they alleged, for a proper occasion. 
Thinking, however, that they deferred this without just 
grounds, he took his own course for the object he had in 
view. He was, I should state, a man of tall stature, 
pleasing countenance and altogether of dignified appear- 
ance. Trusting to the gifts with which nature had en- 
dowed him, he put off his ordinary clothing, and, having 
annointed himself with oil, crowned his head with a 
wreath of poplar, slung a lion's skin across his left shoul- 
der, and, carrying a large club in his right hand, he 
sallied forth to the royal tribunal, at a period when the 
king was dispensing justice. 

"The novelty of his appearance excited the attention 
of the people, and Alexander, soon discovering with 
astonishment the object of their curiosity, ordered the 
crowd to make way for him, and demanded to know 
who he was. 'A Macedonian architect,' replied Dinoc- 
rates, 'who suggests schemes and designs worthy your 
royal renown. I propose to form Mount Athos into the 
statue of a man holding a spacious city in his left hand 
and in his right a huge vase, into which shall be collected 
all the streams of the mountain, which shall thence be 
poured into the sea.' 



166 SOME OLD PIASTERS 

"Alexander, delighted at the proposition, made im- 
mediate inquiry if the soil of the neighborhood were of 
a quality capable of yielding sufficient produce for such 
a state. When, however, he found that all its supplies 
must be furnished by sea, he thus addressed Dinocrates : 
'I admire the grand outline of your scheme, and am well 
pleased with it ; but I am of opinion he would be much to 
blame who planted a colony on such a spot. For as an 
infant is nourished by the milk of its mother, depending 
thereon for its progress to maturity, so a city depends 
on the fertility of the country surrounding it for its 
riches, its strength in population, and not less for its 
defence against an enemy. Though your plan might be 
carried into execution, yet I think it impolitic. I never- 
theless request your attendance upon me, that I may 
otherwise avail myself of your ingenuity.' From that 
time Dinocrates was in constant attendance on the king, 
and followed him into Egypt." 

Vitruvius does not explain why it was that Dinoc- 
rates singled out the curious costume, or rather lack of 
costume, which he did to attract the attention of Alex- 
ander. It was, in fact, the garb of an athlete. Among 
the early Greeks a professional athlete was regarded as 
a person of social distinction, and if a particularly suc- 
cessful one, a personage to whom a statue might be 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 167 

erected, or upon whom other honors might be conferred. 
In fact, the uniform of an athlete was, as a rule, a pass- 
port to the best society. Dinocrates undoubtedly knew 
this, and as he was seeking an entre into the very high- 
est court circles, he took not an extraordinary method 
of gaining it. 

Mount Athos, which the architect proposed to take as 
a basis for what was really to be a gigantic statue of 
Alexander himself, was a pyramidal mountain, at the 
extreme end of the Acte peninsula, having an altitude 
of 6780 feet, and crowned with a cap of white marble, 
which Dinocrates undoubtedly had in mind to utilize 
for a helmet. The country surrounding the mountain 
was remarkable for its rural beauty, its woods and 
ravines, and its people for their longevity. Xo wonder 
that Alexander did not wish to disturb this peaceful 
neighborhood. 

Alexander Pope, who has given us an admirable 
rhymed translation of the songs of Homer, seems to 
have been greatly impressed with the practicability 
of this remarkable idea of Dinocrates. Spence, the 
author of "Polymetis," was once discussing the in- 
cident which Vitruvius relates with Pope, remark- 
ing that he could not see how the Macedonian architect 
could ever have carried his proposal into execution, when 



168 SOME OLD MASTERS 

Pope at once replied : "For my part, I have long since 
had an idea how the thing might be done ; and if any- 
body would make me a present of a Welsh mountain 
and pay the workmen, I would undertake to see it ex- 
ecuted. T have quite formed it sometimes in mv imagi- 
nation: the figure must be in a reclining posture, be- 
cause of the hollowing that would be necessary, and for 
the city's being in one hand. It should be a rude, un- 
equal hill, and might be helped with groves of trees for 
the eyebrows, and a wood for the hair. The natural green 
turf should be left wherever it would be necessary to 
represent the ground he reclines on. It should be con- 
trived so that the true point of view should be at a 
considerable distance. When you are near it, it should 
still have the appearance of a rough mountain, but at a 
proper distance such a rising should be the leg, and 
such another an arm. It would be best if there were a 
river, or rather a lake, at the bottom of it, for the rivulet 
that came through his other hand to tumble down the 
hill and discharge itself into the sea." 

Mrs. Baillie, in her "Tour on the Continent," has also 
a comment to make on this proposition of Dinocrates 
and recalls the fact that a somewhat similar idea was ad- 
vanced to Xapoleon I. "It is somewhat singular," she 
says, "that Mr. Pope should have thought this mad 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 1 69 

project practicable, but it appears that there are still 
persons who dream of such extravagant and fruitless 
undertakings. Some modern Dinocrates had suggested 
to Bonaparte to have cut from the mountain of the Sim- 
plon an immense colossal figure, as a sort of Genius of 
the Alps. This was to have been of such enormous size 
that all the passengers should have passed between its 
legs and arms in a zigzag direction." 

Another ingenious conception is attributed to Dinoc- 
rates in respect to the temple of Diana, which he erected 
in the city of Alexandria for Ptolemy Philadelphus, in 
memory of the sister-wife of that potentate, Arsinoe. 
This relationship, by the way. i- said to have been the 
first ever formed, although it became quite common later 
in the time of the Ptolemies. Arsinoe was much beloved 
by her husband, who not only called an entire district in 
Egypt. Arsinoites, after her, but also gave her name to 
several cities within his realm. Her features are still 
preserved to us upon coins struck in her honor, and 
which represent her crowned with a diadem. 

When Dinocrates received the commission to erect a 
temple to so highly esteemed and devotedly remembered 
a queen, he apparently set his ingenuity to work to give 
birth to a novelty that should not only please the king, 
but astonish his subjects. It finally matured in a prop- 



170 SOME OLD MASTERS 

osition to roof the proposed temple with loadstones, in 
order that they might attract into the air an iron statue 
of Arsinoe. As the figure of the queen would thus 
appear suspended in the air without any apparent mun- 
dane reason, the inference could be drawn that it was by 
the divine will. Some authorities say that the entire 
inner walls of the temple were to have been lined with 
loadstones, so that the statue might appear suspended in 
the very centre of the cell, touching nothing. Fortu- 
nately, both Dinocrates and Ptolemy died before the 
project could be executed, otherwise they might have 
been witnesses to the miserable failure such a chimerical 
fancy must have proved if attempted, as any modern 
electrician will attest. 

When at Ectabana with Alexander, Dinocrates had 
still another opportunity to display his resourceless orig- 
inality, in directing the obsequies of Hephiestion, which 
were of a most extraordinarily elaborate nature, costing, 
it is recorded, 12,000 talents, or what would be equiva- 
lent to over $1,300,000. Tlephsostion was a Macedonian 
and a close and warm friend of Alexander, accompany- 
ing the young king in a military capacity throughout 
most of his early foreign campaigns. So attached was 
Alexander to his friend that he not only showed him 
many marks of his personal esteem, but bestowed upon 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 171 

him in marriage Drypetis, the sister of his own bride, 
Statira. At Ectabana Hepha?stion was attacked by a 
fever which had a fatal termination after an illness of 
seven days. Alexander's grief over the loss of his 
brother-in-law was violent and extreme, and is said to 
have found vent in the most extravagant demonstrations. 
He ordered general mourning throughout the entire em- 
pire, and Dinocrates to build a funeral pile and monu- 
ment to him in Babylon, where the body had been con- 
veyed from Ectabana, at a cost of $1,000,000. 

But the richest occasion afforded Dinocrates to dis- 
play to the fullest his great talents and genius was the 
laying out of the city which Alexander determined to 
found in Egypt, and which, bearing the conqueror's 
name, was destined to become the centre of the com- 
mercial activity of the new empire. This great city, 
which rapidly grew to be one of the most populous of 
ancient times, and which has maintained, if not its 
original share of industrial supremacy, at least an im- 
portant existence throughout the ages that have elapsed 
from its nativity to the present time, we cannot resist 
thinking was probably as much the inspiration of Alex- 
ander's favorite architect, realizing its professional pos- 
sibilities, as it was that of Alexander himself. Pliny 
informs us that Dinocrates died before he could give 



172 SOME OLD MASTERS 

the city the full proportions which he had planned, but 
not certainly until its principal features were executed. 

Strabo, the "squint-eyed" geographer, gives a more 
circumstantial account of the planning of the new city 
by Dinocrates and his powerful and ambitious patron. 
It must have been indeed an interesting sight to see the 
two Macedonians upon the plane which was selected for 
the site of the city, laying out the streets and avenues, 
marking the run of the walls that were to surround it, 
locating the different sites where were to stand the pub- 
lic buildings, parks, palaces and temples, and perhaps 
disputing and arguing over the questions that arose, as 
two such dominant intellects might very naturally be 
supposed to do. 

The basis of the plan were two main streets crossing 
each other at right angles, each one hundred feet wide 
and lined with colonnades. The other streets were to 
run parallel to these. ISTear the centre of the proposed 
city was to be clustered the public buildings, the Mu- 
seum and the Serna, which subsequently contained an 
alabaster coffin in which rested the remains of Alexan- 
der. Alabaster, which the Greks obtained from Thebes, 
was much used for mortuary purposes, as well as for 
columns and statues. 

Plutarch also describes the planning of the city as 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 173 

follows : "As chalk-dust was lacking, they laid out their 
lines on the black, loamy soil with flour, first swinging a 
circle to enclose a wide space, and then drawing lines as 
chords of the arc to complete with harmonious propor- 
tions, something like the oblong form of a soldier's cape. 
While the king was congratulating himself on this plan, 
on a. sudden a countless number of birds of various sorts 
flew over from the land and the lake in clouds, and, set- 
tling upon the spot, devoured in a short time all the flour, 
so that Alexander was much disturbed in mind at the 
omen involved, till the augurs restored his confidence 
again, telling him the city he was planning was destined 
to be rich in resources and a feeder of the nations of 
men," a prophecy which proved its truth in the fulfil- 
ment. 

Dinocrates was not, however, the only architect em- 
ployed in laying out so large a city, as might naturally 
be supposed, although he was, of course, the governing 
one. How many more there were it would be difficult 
to say, but there is record at least of two others, both 
probably employed by the rapacious and unscrupulous 
Cleomenes, whom Alexander left in Egypt as hyparch 
under Ptolemy Philadelphia. Olynthius is the name 
given of one of these architects and Parmenion of the 
other. The latter was entrusted more particularly with 



174 SOME OLD MASTERS 

the superintendency of the works of sculpture, espe- 
cially in the temple of Serapis, which, by the way, came 
to be called by his name, Pharmenionis. Bryaxis is also 
credited with statuary work there. 

Upon the island of Pharos, which was joined to the 
city of Alexander by a wide mole, about three-quarters 
of a mile long, in which were two bridges over channels 
communicating between the eastern and western har- 
bors, was built by Ptolemy Soter and his son in the 
year 282 B.C., a most famous lighthouse and a very 
glorious ancestor of such guardians of the coast as exist 
to-day. 

This lighthouse was planned by Sostratus, another re- 
markable character in the architectural roll of honor of 
those early times. He was a native of Cnidus, a town 
in Caria in Asia Minor, to the south of Ionia and Lydia, 
celebrated also as the birthplace of several other men 
who rose to distinction in the early days of the Greek 
colonies as mathematicians and astronomers. Cnidus 
was almost equally remarkable in its possession of two 
famous works of the statuary's art : one the figure of a 
lion carved from a single block of Pentelic marble, ten 
feet long by six feet wide, which was executed to com- 
memorate the great victory of Caria ; the other a statue 
of Venus by Praxiteles, which occupied one of the three 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 175 

temples to the goddess in that city. It is said that Nico- 
medes of Bithynia was so fascinated by the rare beauty 
of this figure that he offered to liquidate the debt of 
Cnidus, which was by no means a small one, if the citi- 
zens would cede the statue to him. They refused, how- 
ever, to part with it at any price, esteeming it one of the 
glories of their city. Cnidus contained many beautiful 
architectural monuments, the ruins of which are still 
prominent. 

Sostratus, the architect, was the son of Dexiphanes, 
and must not be mistaken for any one of several other 
artists of the same name who are conspicuously men- 
tioned by the early writers. His first fame was ac- 
quired through his connection with the celebrated so- 
called hanging gardens which he built in his native coun- 
try. They consisted of a series of porticos or colon 
nades supporting terraces, surrounding an enclosure, 
possibly the Agora of the city, and served as a prome- 
nade for the inhabitants. Pliny says that Sostratus 
was the first to erect anything of the kind. This state- 
ment may be excused, either because the hanging gar- 
dens of Sostratus differed widely from the well-known 
ones of Babylon, which antedated them by several hun- 
dred years, or because Pliny forgot for a moment those 
of Semiramis. 



176 SOME OLD MASTEES 

Strabo, who was probably right in his judgment, 
thinks that the greatest of Sostratus's works was the 
towering light-house at Pharos, which he built at a cost 
of about $900,000, although from its size it would seem 
that it should have cost more. This colossal tower at 
once took its place among the seven wonders of the 
ancient world. It pierced the sky at a height of four 
hundred and fifty feet, or about one hundred and sev- 
enty-five feet above the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge 
and fifty feet above the torch with which the Goddess 
of Liberty illuminates the harbor of New York. But 
its height alone was not more marvellous than its other 
proportions, which were upon a most extravagant scale. 
The ground story was hexagonal, the sides alternately 
convex and concave, and each was one-eighth of a mile 
in length. The second and third stories were each of 
the same form, although decreasing in size ; the fourth 
was square, flanked by four round towers, and the fifth 
or top story was circular. A grand staircase led through 
each story to the roof of the building, where every night 
massive fires were lighted, revealing the sea for a hun- 
dred miles. 

When we consider that this colossal building was 
made entirely of wrought stone — when we reflect upon 
the amount of labor involved in its construction, its 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. l77 

ponderous size and dizzy altitude — we cannot but marvel 
at the extraordinary breadth of conception manifested 
by its architect and builders and the tenacity with which 
they must have held to the completion of their huge 
undertaking. It is not to be wondered at that when 
Sostratus stood off and contemplated this mighty prod- 
uct of his imagination and genius, after its completion, 
he should have been actuated with the desire to have his 
name associated with it for all time, and indelibly en- 
graved somewhere upon its imperishable stone. The 
story is that Sostratus engraved an inscription upon one 
of the stones which he afterward covered with cement, 
and on the cement he inscribed the name of Ptolemy, 
knowing that in time the cement would decay and leave 
exposed the hidden writing upon the stone beneath. 
Strabo says that the concealed inscription read: 
"Sostratus, the friend of kings, made me ;" but 
Lucien gives it differently, thus: " Sostratus of 
Cnidus, the son of Dexiphanes [that he might not 
be mistaken for any other Sostratus, doubtless], to the 
Gods the Saviors for the safety of Mariners." 

Pliny does not share the opinion that the inscription 
was a concealed one, but speaks of the incident as a 
special instance of the magnanimity of Ptolemy, that he 
should not only have allowed the name of the architect 



ITS SOME OLD MASTERS 

to be inscribed upon the building, but that he should 
have also left its nature and language to the discretion 
of Sostratus. The words "Gods the Saviors/' he be- 
lieves, referred to the reigning king and queen, with 
their successors, who were ambitious of the title 
'"Soteros" or Savior. 

It would be unfair, perhaps, to the great Grecian 
architects of the time of Alexander if Andronicus Cyr- 
rhestes were to be classed among them, and Cyr- 
rhestes also, having been a scientific character with a 
leaning toward astronomy, might with some justice feel 
aggrieved were he to know that he was to be considered 
in a category of professional men to which his calling 
was in no degree related. Still the little building which 
he designed and erected in Athens is such an interest- 
ing one, and has always held so prominent a place among 
the architectural treasures of the Attic city, that it 
might be regarded as an intentional oversight to leave 
him out in a book of this kind. Some authorities place 
this building as belonging to the time of Alexander the 
Great, others believe that it was erected at a later period, 
and one writer gives Andronicus an existence as late as 

100 B.C. 

This building, which Delambre speaks of as "the most 
curious existing monument of the practical gnomonics 



OF GKEEK ARCHITECTURE. 179 

of antiquity," has sometimes been called the ''Tower of 
JEolus." Let us see what Vitruvius has to say regard- 
ing the winds and the building: "Some have chosen 
to reckon only four winds: the East, blowing from the 
equinoctial sunrise ; the South, from the noonday sun ; 
the West, from the equinoctial sun-setting; and the 
Xorth, from the Polar Stars. But those who are more 
exact have reckoned eight winds, particularly Androni- 
cus Cyrrhestes, who on this system erected an octagon 
marble tower at Athens, and on every side of the octagon 
he has wrought a figure in relievo, representing the wind 
which blew against that side ; the top of this tower he 
finished with a conical marble, on which he placed a 
brazen Triton, holding a wand in his hand ; this Triton 
is so contrived that he turns with the wind, and always 
stops when he directly faces it, pointing his wand over 
the figure of the wind at that time blowing." 

It is in connection with his allusion to the tower of 
Cyrrhestes, and his description of how to construct a 
sun-dial, that Vitruvius gives some valuable hints as to 
the way the ancients laid out a city so that its streets 
were protected from the prevailing winds. He says : "Let 
a marble slab be fixed level in the centre of the space 
enclosed by the walls, or let the ground be smoothed or 
levelled, so that the slab may not be necessary. In the 



180 SOME OLD MASTERS 

centre of this plane, for the purpose of marking the 
shadow correctly, a brazen gnomon must be erected. 
The shadow cast by the gnomon is to be marked about 
the fifth ante-meridional hour, and the extreme point of 
the shadow accurately determined. From the central 
point of the space whereon the gnomon stands, as a 
centre, with a distance equal to the length of the shadow 
just observed, describe a circle. After the sun has 
passed the meridian watch the shadow which the 
gnomon continues to cast till the moment when its ex- 
tremity again touches the circle which has been de- 
scribed. From the two points thus obtained in the cir- 
cumference of the circle describe two arcs intersecting 
each other, and through their intersection and the 
centre of the circle first described draw a line to its 
extremity : this line will indicate the north and south 
points. One-sixteenth part of the circumference of the 
whole circle is to be set out to the right and left of the 
north and south points, and drawing lines from the 
points thus obtained to the centre of the circle, we hav? 
one-eighth part of the circumference for the region of 
the north, and another eighth part for the region of the 
south. Divide the remainders of the circumference 
on each side into three equal parts, and the divisions or 
regions of the eight winds will be obtained; then let 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. 181 

the directions of the streets and lanes be determined 
by the tendency of the lines which separate the different 
regions of the winds. Thus will their force be broken 
and turned away from the honses and public ways ; for 
if the directions of the streets be parallel to those of 
the winds, the latter will rush through them with 
greater violence, since from occupying the whole space 
of the surrounding country they will be forced up 
through a narrow pass. Streets or public ways ought 
therefore to be so set out that when the winds blow hard 
their violence may be broken against the angles of the 
different divisions of the city, and thus dissipated." 

This tower still stands a fairly well-preserved ruin, 
and retains many of its original architectural features 
and decorations. There are two entrances through 
distyle porticos, the capitals of the columns presenting 
an original treatment of the Corinthian order. One of 
these entrances is on the northeast side and the other on 
the southwest. On the south side is a circular apsidical 
projection. This was probably originally used for a 
reservoir to hold the water brought from the spring Clep- 
sydra, on the northwest of the Acropolis, which was 
employed as the power to run a clepsydra, or water- 
elock, taking its name, as may be inferred, from the 
spring. The remains of this clock are still visible. The 



182 SOME OLD MASTERS 

exterior of the building was also arranged as a sun- 
clock, having lines engraved upon the different sides, 
with gnomons above them, forming a series of sun-dials 
which indicated the time by shadows. Thus were the 
people of Athens kept publicly posted as to the time of 
day — by the sun when it shone, or by the water-clock 
when it was obscured by clouds. 

The character of the architecture, the proportions of 
the building, as well as its secular uses, were all quite 
out of harmony with Grecian art and methods, and are 
essentially Roman. As a similar structure existed at 
one time in Rome, supposed to have been built by the 
same scientist, the thought is naturally suggested that 
Cyrrhestes may have been a Roman. 

In closing this reference to the prominent architects 
of the disintegrating period of Grecian history, it would 
seem that it only remains to recall Philo, or Philon, as 
some of the writers have preferred to call him, once 
more, who nourished about 318 b.c. As there were 
several artists of his name who became conspicuous at 
about the same time, our Philo will be distinguished 
from the others in being a native Athenian. 

The reader will probably remember that he has been 
already mentioned as the architect employed by Demet- 
rius Phalerus, to build a portico of twelve Doric col- 



OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE. • 183 

imms to the great temple of Ceres and Proserpine at 
Eleusis, originally erected by Ictinus ; but his most am- 
bitious work was probably the armory, so called, which 
he designed for Lycurgus in the Piraeus, and which it is 
said was large enough to contain the arms for one thou- 
sand ships. He was also engaged in enlarging the port 
of Piraeus, and was the architect of the white marble 
theatre at Athens, which was finished by Ariobarzanes, 
and many years afterward rebuilt by Hadrian. Vitru- 
vius says that he also designed a number of Greek 
temples. 

Philo must have been a man of considerable versatil- 
ity, for it is related that in giving an account of his 
work at Piraeus "he expressed himself with such pre- 
cision, purity and eloquence that the Athenian people 
— excellent judges of those matters — pronounced him 
equally a fluent orator and an admirable architect." He 
wrote also several works on the architecture of temples 
and one on the naval basin which he constructed in the 
Athenian port. 

THE END. 



INDEX. 



1S5 



INDEX OF ARCHITECTS AND ARCHITECTURAL 
SCULPTORS. 



,-Eacus, 
Agamedes, 

AgXAPTXS, 

Antimachides, 

axtiphilus, 

axtistates, 

Apollodorus, 

Athenis, 

Batrachus, 

Bryaxis, 

BUPALUS, . 

Calleschros, 

Callicrates, 

Caiximachus, 

Calos (see Perdix; 

Caxxia, Luigi, 

Celer, 

Chersiphrox, 

Clecetas, . 

gorcebus, . 

CossrTius, 

Ctesiphox, 



page 

. 27 

42, G3 

. 89 

. SO 

. 80 

. 80 

19, 158 

. 87 

. 162 

140, 145, 174 

. 87 

. 80 

105, 114 

53, 58 



S2 
155 

38 
133 
123 

81 

08 



186 



INDEX. 



*» 



Cyrbhestes, Andronicus 

D.EDALUS, . 

Damophilus, 
Daphnis, . 
Demetrius, 
Detrianus, 

DlBUTADES, 
DlNOCBATES, 
EUPOLINUS, 
EUEYCLES, . 

Gaudentius ( Note ) , 

GlTIADAS, . 

gobgasus, . 

Hermocbeon, 

Hebmodobus, 

Hebmogenes, 

Hebmon, 

HlPPODAMUS, 

ICABUS, 

ICTINUS, 

Lacbates, . 

Leochabes, 

Libon, 

Megacles, 

Menalippus, 

Metagenes, 

mxesicles, 

mutianus, 

Mybilla, Democopus 

Olynthitts, , 

Pabmenion, 

-1 ffft 



PAGE 

. ITS 

. 30 

. 80 

74, 77 

74, 77 

19, 160 

37 

19, 76, 164 

133 

89 

17 

41 

86 

89 

163 

53 

89 

105 

32 

19, 107, 114, 123 
. 89 
140, 146 
82, 84 
. 80 
. 127 
68, 124 
I, 112, 128 
76 
133 
173 
173 



1! 



INDEX. 187 

PAGE 

Peonius, 74, 77 

Perdix, 31, 30 

Phileus, 140 

Phidias, 13, 85, 90, 98, 115, 131 

Philo, 123,182 

Philocles, 121 

polycletus, 13, 131 

polycritus, 37 

PORINUS, 80 

POTH^US, 89 

Praxiteles, 13, 74, 130, 144 

Pteras, 3 ^ 

Pyrrhus, 8y 

Pytheus, 57 

Rhoecus, 19, 38 

Satyrus, I 40 

Saurus, 1° 2 

Scopas, 58, 74, 130 

Severus, • 155 

SlLENUS, 1^3 

Smilis, 3S 

sostratus, i? 1 * 

Spintharus, . 65 

Stallius, Caius, 127 

Stallitjs, Marius, 127 

Talos ( see Perdix ) . 

Tarchesius, 57 

Theodorus, 19, 38, 70 

Timotheus, 140, 140 

Trophonius, 42, 63 

Vitruvius, 20, 49, 68, 71, 79, 83, 104, 170 







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